President of Iceland Olafur Grimsson just says no!. And so do I!

Icesave! This was the name of the Icelandic bank that in 2008 promised big interest and big profits and took The Netherlands and Great Britain by storm… only to default a few months later. Icesave was a subsidiary of Landsbankki Bank, that also defaulted at the same time.

Icesave ruined a lot of people: the Dutch and English taxpayers, the uncautious savers that put their money there and especially the poor dopes that invested more money than the Dutch or British state warranted (in case of The Netherlands: + 100,000 EUR).

But should it also ruin the Icelandic taxpayers? President Olafur Grimmson of Iceland doesn’t think so and therefore he just says “No, the hell it shouldn’t!”

And it might sound funny, but as a Dutch guy I agree with him.

To be clear about it: I hate banks like Icesave and its parent Landsbankki that purposely went to Great Britain and The Netherlands to collect huge amounts of cash, before they imploded. This is what it smells like: a 100%, fullblown scam! But should that ruin the Icelandic people?

There are three kinds of parties here:

-         Guilty party

-         Imprudent parties

-         Innocent parties

Guilty parties

In my opinion the following party is guilty:

-     The CEO’s, management and shareholders of Landsbankki and Icesave that set up a 5 billion EUR scam operation.

Imprudent parties

The following parties are (at least) imprudent:

-     The Dutch and British supervisors that saw the danger coming, but didn’t do anything. And afterwards washed their hands of it, saying “the law prohibited to warn the people”. If that is true, for what do we have supervisors anyway?!

-     The Dutch and British savers that invested their savings at a bank without history, but with a fancy logo and billboards and a lot of blah blah…

-      The most imprudent for me where the people that invested (much) more in Icesave than the amount that was warranted by the Dutch and British governments and lost the surplus amount.

And the innocent parties are of course the Dutch, British and Icelandic taxpayers that are on the hook for the losses caused by Icesave.

The Dutch and British taxpayers were already unlucky enough to be obliged to pay back the losses for the warranted amount. But does that mean that 400,000 Icelandic people have to cough up 5 billion EUR, as they are “guilty by association”?? Don’ t be foolish!

Get the money at the people that profited from the Icesave and Landsbankki scams: CEO, management and share- and bondholders. Squeeze those guys dry. But leave the poor Icelandic people alone.

And let’s get rid of those supervisors that didn’t supervise!

And for the savers that invested their total amount of money in Icesave: you learned a lesson. Please think where you invest your money next time!

To tell an anecdote about this subject: a colleague of mine that invested his savings in Icesave lost it… but got it back from the Dutch government. The first thing he did was looking for the next House-of-cards bank to reinvest his returned money, as they paid the most interest. How stupid can you be?

Ernst