Björgólfur Guðmundsson

Arion Bank’s bizarre acrobatics

February 10, 2010

God, there are so many corruption scandals emerging these days that my head is spinning. I’d love to inform the World at Large [that's you] about them but honestly, I wouldn’t know where to start. Except maybe with Kaupthing Arion Bank’s bizarre and completely outrageous settlements with this country’s former tycoons. First, Hagar. Hagar is [...]

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Who needs paperwork when you own a bank

January 11, 2010

So, it seems that the liquidator of Samson ehf. – the majority owner in Landsbanki -  is having some trouble recovering a few of the company’s assets in the form of loans that Samson – the bank’s holding company – lent to companies associated with itself. One of the loans was for ISK 20 billion [...]

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Russia is our new best friend, redux

July 19, 2009

One piece of news that went largely unnoticed in all the hoopla surrounding the EU accession talks last week was the one about Russia having approved a USD 500 million loan to Iceland. As some of you may recall, talk of a Russian loan first surfaced last year, just as our financial system was beginning [...]

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Just when you think things can’t get any more corrupt … THEY DO!!

July 10, 2009

Apropos the last post, it now transpires that the mere dividends that the two Björgólfurs received from their ownership of Landsbanki were actually HIGHER than the loan they would now like to have written off. The loan they took to be able to buy the bank. In other words, they milked out of the bank [...]

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Of debts and assets and moguls who bugger off to Russia

May 5, 2009

So, I thought we’d have an outage, but as it turned out – we didn’t. It just took a while for the Intertubes to switch from seeing the blog on the old server to the new one … and how long that takes varies from one computer to another. In fact, some people may still [...]

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