Icelandic Prime Minister Resigns After Panama Data Leak (bloomberg.com)

Omar Valdimarsson, reporting for Bloomberg: The Panama secrecy leak claimed its first scalp after Icelandic Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson resigned following revelations about his personal finances. The decision was announced in parliament after the legislature had been the focus of street protests that attracted thousands of Icelanders angered by the alleged tax evasion of their leader. Gunnlaugsson, who will step down a year before his term was due to end, gave in to mounting pressure from the opposition and even from corners of his own party. The Panama documents leak, printed in newspapers around the world, showed that the 41-year-old premier and his wife had investments placed in the British Virgin Islands, which included debt in Iceland's three failed banks. An article on The Guardian sheds more light on this: The leaked documents from the Mossack Fonseca law firm show Gunnlaugsson and his wife, Anna Sigurlaug Palsdottir, bought a British Virgin Islands-based offshore company, Wintris Inc, in December 2007 to invest her share of the proceeds of the sale of her father's business, Iceland's only Toyota importer. Gunnlaugsson sold his 50% stake to his wife for a symbolic $1 at the end of 2009, eight months after he was elected to parliament as an MP for the centre-right Progressive party. He failed, however, to declare an interest in the company either then or when he became prime minister in 2013. His office has said his shareholding was an error due simply to the couple having a joint bank account and that it had "always been clear to both of them that the prime minister's wife owned the assets." The transfer of ownership was made as soon as this was pointed out, a spokesman said. The prime minister denies he was required to declare an interest.

Comments

wow, they have a real accountable democracy

[liquid_schwartz]

Kinda cold for me and I'm not a huge pickled fish eater but otherwise they always sound great.

Re:wow, they have a real accountable democracy

[quintessencesluglord]

Keep in mind this is the same country that allowed banks to fail and threw the bankers responsible in jail during the 2008 crisis. Everyone predicted their economy would implode, but actually recovered more quickly than several other European countries.

I imagine the sting from that has made them more wary of even a hint of corruption, which is oddly starting to reverberate through the US after TARP, TPP, and now no real recovery in sight.

Re:wow, they have a real accountable democracy

[Rei]

That is not in the slightest the issue.

First off, this government's popularity has gone totally down the drain because of their continued efforts to enrich themselves and their friends at the expense of the nation (selling off bank assets in no-bid auctions at a tiny fraction of their value to family members of government officials, fighting to get Iceland expanded fishing quotas and then just handing them off to the fishing barons, etc), their continuous attempts to stifle press freedom, and countless other things. The prime minister's, before this incident, was in polls the choice of only 12% of the electorate. This is just the latest outrage in a long string of them.

Now, for the actual issue. Simmi and his wealthy wife, back before the financial crash, set up an offshore shell company to secretly buy shares in the three large Icelandic banks that turned out, one year later, to go catastrophically belly-up. Now the two of them (50-50 owners in the company) were creditors, scrambling with the other creditors over the right to the remains of the banks. They were what we refer to as "vultures". But this was in secret.

Then Simmi ran for office as the head of Framsóknarflokkurinn (Progress Party), a right-populist party (some might call it the "Idiot Party", as they run every year on some variant of "We're going to give you TONS OF MONEY, and nobody's going to have to pay for it, not EVERS!"). His big thing was that he was part of a group fighting against the wicked vultures trying to pick Iceland dry. When in actuality, of course, he was a vulture.

We haven't gotten to the problem part yet.

Because then he was elected. And the regulations (beyond general conflict of interest) are that if you own more than a 25% stake in an investment company, you have to disclose it. He was prime minister for months before he did anything. And that "doing something" was not to disclose his secret holdings, but to sell them to his wife for $1 (which still didn't remove the conflict of interest).

Still not to the problem part.

Because as the head of the government, he then pursued policies to get 2B euro of money that otherwise would have gone to the state to instead go to the creditors. "The creditors" including his wife and other secret accounts owned by other members of the governing coalition.

Basically, he robbed the country to make up for his investment losses.

Furthermore, people, stop the whoop-di-doo about his resignation. Because he's just stepping back to running the party behind the scenes while one of his ministers is taking over. The governing coalition isn't leaving. Actually Simmi reportedly tried to break the coalition, but the president wouldn't let him. Now he says that the president is lying about that, that he never planned to break it.

Re:wow, they have a real accountable democracy

[Rei]

Pickled fish isn't widely eaten here. A commonly eaten thing you're not used to is harðfiskur, which is basically fish jerky. But most food here is pretty standard western fare...probably the most commonly eaten food here is pizza.

Now, if you want weird stuff, we've got no shortage of options! Want rotten ammonia-reeking poisonous shark? You can have it with some fermented whale and sheep head if you'd like....

Pirate Party

[doconnor]

Of interest to Slashdotters is that the Pirate Party of Iceland currently has a generous lead in the polls if an early election is called.