The Icesave fraud case

I will keep this as short as I can. I ask those who read this to read the whole entry.

When the credit lines closed on Iceland in mid 2007, the Icesave had been started to drain money from the UK to divert into offshore island for personal gain. This is no bullshit, this is what most of the money went into. The UK was systematically drained of money. This flow of cash kept the banks alive here in Iceland, and kept up the vail of deception pulled over the eyes of the public and in some parts the politicians´as well.

The Central Bank knew there was a problem with the Icesave because of the Icelandic government financial backup responsibility to the people if the bank went bankrupt. Just what happened in fact. The Central Bank approved the deal instead of saying no to this madness or agreeing to valid deals made in a nation of 50 million, compared with our 300,000 inhabitants here in Iceland.

The deception was kept alive by the media, owned by the bankers, and the Icelandic Chamber of Commerce, The Independence party, the Central Bank, the government and all those who played along to the song of easy money. The worst part is that when some hard criticism came along from academics and the foreign media they where shot down and said to jealous, angry or plain stupid. The media, the Central Bank and the government said this.

When the Icesave was started in the Netherlands the credit lines were already closed to Icelandic banks and financial companies. The bank mangers of Landsbanki Sigurjón Þ. Árnason and Halldór J. Kristjánsson sent a letter to the DNB (the Dutch Central Bank called De Nederldsche Bank) and the Icelandic Financial Supervisory Authority (FME) and told them that the Icelandic state would secure the minimum legal amounts of money if the bank would go under. The letter was sent as a response to the DNB when it tried to stop the starting of the Icesave money drainage because they had serious worries about the ability of the Icelandic insurance fund would cover the legal minimum amounts if things went badly.

The DNB also had serious general worries about the Icelandic economic system as a whole. The worried about the size of the system that was growing way to fast and that it was on the brink of collapse. The letter from the bankers claims that they have assurance from the British financial authority that the Icelandic government will guarantee the money, and that the Icelandic government have sent out a letter explaining their commitments regarding the guarantees in accordance to the EU regulations.

The bankers also say that they are happy with this assurance and that this should go a long way of clearing up the DNB worries about the insurance guarantees.

This is incredible… the newspaper Morgunblaðið who reports the last part, has not done any research trying to find this letter of guarantee from the government. What about the Dutch and British financial authorities? Where is their responsibility if one letter is enough for them while they clearly have worries about the whole Icelandic financial system? Are they not just as responsible for giving the green light on this deals?

Why have those men not been arrested? Everything they own and are connected to seized and assets frozen? Allen Stanford was arrested and charged, his associates as well. Their assets frozen too when the Ponzi scheme was found out. This Icesave is a Ponzi scheme, a deliberate attempt to steal money from innocent people for personal gain.

The Icelandic public has to pay for it, and the bankers knew it all along. That is not just scamming some investors who takes risks, they used the whole nation. The Icelandic politicians are just as guilty as the rest of them, but they take no responsibility for this mess.

The letter from the bankers was sent on September 23rd 2008. A week or so before the whole house of cards crumbled down in flames. Another criminal act directly involving the banks was, that in late 2007 the bankers and their closest friends and family, that include business men, where told to clear out the accounts and get the money from the Icelandic banks because they knew that a collapse was imminent. Of course it was looming, the credit lines had been closed, they had no flow of money. They where at a standstill and waiting for the inevitable days when they had to pay their loans to creditors, and they had not way of doing that. The money was all gone to the offshore islands. Cayman, Tortola, Cyprus, Guernsey, Jersey and similar places.

Still the propaganda held up by the media, the banks and the politicians towards the Icelandic public, and the UK and Dutch public was to keep the money rolling into the banks. The Icelandic public where told to invest in the special deals, told to transfer money from safe accounts to some sort of stock/bonds accounts that had no legal insurance while they where told that those accounts where the safest in the banks.

The public was deliberately lied to and the deception was complete. The banks fell, the Brits and Dutch, and Germans too are pissed off and we Icelanders have to loose our savings, our homes, our jobs, our dignity. We also have to pay for the Germans, the Dutch and the Brits.

We are only starting to “feel the cold dead hand of the neoconservatist financial free market monster” that tore through the world and is still squeezing the Icelandic nation, even after it’s death. We don’t get a recession, we get a complete collapse and a depression, not only financial but mental as well. Iceland has now got to deal with massive financial government difficulties that make the political situation fragile, the employments situations will get worse, strikes, layoffs on a massive scale have already begun. People are loosing hope.

Prices of food are rising fast, tax increases are heavy, downgrades of service, job layoffs, assets fall in value and then we are squeezed like a beaten nation and then get a deal that we simply cannot pay. EVER.

It´s not that we don’t want to pay, Iceland has never stood anyone up, and as a nation we have always paid our international debts, but the question that remains is this: Will we be here as a nation in a few years?

By the looks of it Iceland seems destined to be crushed by the British and Dutch governments, not to mention the IMF in handling this mess.