Midway and snow-blind I am forced to pull over. Grabbing up a handful of stones from the road, my passenger manically assaults the snow.
Posts Tagged ‘Handful’
Iceland Crisis Report Expected Around Easter
Thursday, March 18th, 2010Iceland First Lady wanders off alone in India
Saturday, January 16th, 2010
Mumbai police were surprised and worried when they appeared to lose Icelandic First Lady Dorrit Moussaieff.
Dorrit is in India with her husband, President Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, on an official state visit. A team of 25 police officers were scrambled to search for the First Lady after she disappeared from her hotel, Times of India reports.
However, shortly before the army got involved, she returned to Hotel Trident laden with shopping bags after six hours spent shopping and at a spa.
According to Times of India, Dorrit has requested a very low-key police guard and only a small handful of police are following her in near complete silence – so discreetly in fact that the rest of the police force did not know where the First Lady had gone.
Eva Joly to Dutch media: “Netherlands being arrogant”
Saturday, January 9th, 2010
Eva Joly, the MEP and white collar crime fighter now assisting Iceland’s Special Prosecutor, was interviewed this week in the Dutch NRC Handelsblad. She spoke about her experience investigating fraud at the Elf oil company in France during the 1990s, about the tax evasion of multinational businesses and about her work in Iceland.
Below is the transcript of the interview relating specifically to Iceland. The rest can be read on the NRC website, here.
“The handful of banks that led that island to its doom are all private enterprises. When they collapsed, at the end of 2008, they had ten times more money in their current accounts than the state. The government was left powerless. There are about 330,000 Icelanders and most of them had nothing to do with this. But now the banks’ deficits have become the state’s deficit, affecting everybody. This is theft of public money.”
How is the investigation coming along?
“I cannot say much. The investigation is in progress and might take a couple of years.”
The Icelandic president does not feel that Iceland should repay the Netherlands and the UK back the damages incurred by IceSave’s demise. What is your opinion of the Dutch and British insistence that they do?
“The Netherlands and the UK are being arrogant. They are asking for 2.7 and 1.3 billion euros respectively at 5.5 percent interest. But Iceland’s public debt amounts to 300 percent of GDP. They will never be able to pay back the whole amount.”
Still, Dutch money has vanished.
“Yes, but the Dutch need to understand that it is both unrealistic and unreasonable to demand everything be repaid with so much interest, and to make this a condition for Iceland’s entry into the EU. What IceSave did was wrong, but the Dutch and the British are also partly to blame. All business was conducted through IceSave’s branch offices. The Dutch and British financial regulators said: these branches are not covered by our jurisdiction because they are the Icelandic supervisor’s responsibility. But everybody knew there was no way a handful of people in Reykjavik would be able to supervise properly what was happening in Amsterdam and London. According to a European directive, EU countries should regulate multinationals from outside the EU operating on their territory just as strictly as home-grown enterprises.”
Meaning the Dutch supervisor was negligent?
“To a certain extent, yes. The Dutch were supposed to ensure that the regulators in Reykjavik were doing a proper job, which they weren’t. The Netherlands has tried to cover its tracks citing IceSave’s legal status. Scandalous, really.”
How will this all end?
“If you do not meet Iceland halfway, only fishermen will remain on the island and you still won’t have your money back. The brain drain has begun: 8,000 highly educated people have already left the island and more will follow. It is not in our interest to impoverish Iceland. It has natural resources we might need in the future and it has a strategic location. We should not bully them, but negotiate, in a more grown up and proper fashion than we are currently doing.“
Hildur Guðnadóttir / múm Activity (incl Fever Ray Shows)
Friday, October 23rd, 2009Cellist, experimentalist and múm member Hildur Guðnadóttir will continue to tour North America with múm this winter. She will be opening a handful of shows on their tour with her solo material…
Eva Joly criticises Europe over Iceland debt
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
The Norwegian-French judge Eva Joly is famous for her fraud investigation skills and has been hired by Iceland to advise its bank crash investigators and help solve the mysteries surrounding the country’s economic downfall.
On Saturday she took a sidestep from her official role by writing an opinion piece for several major European newspapers lambasting Europe’s treatment of Iceland over recent months.
Joly has often proven herself unafraid to criticise the Icelandic government and figures within the judiciary and investigation committee. It is, after all, her job to criticise and affect change for the benefit of everyone (except the guilty).
In this instance the common good leads Joly to believe that Europe is approaching Iceland unfairly – especially the Netherlands and the UK.
By forcing Iceland to pay enormous compensation for the Icesave debacle, the countries are helping to reduce Iceland to poverty, increase migration and increase the likelihood that the country will fail, default and never pay back its debts. She also believes they are failing to take responsibility for their own mistakes in the fiasco.
Under EU regulations, Landsbanki was entitled to set up its Icesave branches in the Netherlands and the UK and the respective governments could do nothing to stop them. It is also true that branches (as opposed to subsidiaries) remain under the supervision of authorities in their home country and not in the host country.
Joly’s point hinges on the part of the EU rule that states the host country should ensure that the branch is being regulated in its home country to the same high standards as the host country’s own banks.
According to Joly, had the UK and Dutch authorities stuck to this rule diligently, the Icelandic financial authorities would have had to regulate Landsbanki and Icesave much better, possibly avoiding the collapse altogether.
“Could anyone realistically think that a handful of people in Reykjavik could effectively control the activities of a bank in the heart of The City?” Joly writes in the Telegraph. “European directives concerning financial conglomerates suggest that EU member states allowing foreign banking subsidiaries into their territories must ensure they are subject to the same control abroad as they would be domestically.
“So, was there a failure on the part of the British authorities on this point, which would not be particularly surprising considering the “performance” of other English (sic) banks during the financial crisis? If so, Mr Brown’s activism in relation to Iceland might be motivated by a wish to appear powerful in the eyes of his electorate.
“Of course, the Icelandic institutions have much responsibility. But does that necessarily mean that the responsibility of the British authorities should be overlooked, dumping it all on the Icelandic people alone?”
Highlights of the original article can be seen here, and a longer, more detailed version of the same here.
Runaway African footballers prompt migration law review
Thursday, July 30th, 2009
A recent incident involving five young footballers from Tanzania who were in Sweden for the annual Gothia Cup tournament has prompted Swedish immigration authorities to tighten their entry requirements for any player who is not from Europe. The Gothia Cup is the world’s largest youth football tournament, but it is emerging as a gateway to illegal migration.
During this year’s tournament, which is held in the Swedish town of Heden near Gothenburg, five Tanzanian youths simply disappeared. None of them have yet applied for asylum in Sweden or any other Schengen country, but it is assumed they plan to stay in Europe.
Although young foreign players vanish into the crowds every year after the tournament, this year the Swedish Migration Board has decided to make it harder for them to do so. Beginning in 2011, all players will have to provide fingerprints in order to get their entry visa to Sweden, The Local reports. This will help track them down if and when they apply for asylum.
Leif Andersson of the Migration Board says most defectors wait several weeks before applying for asylum, making it hard for authorities to tie the applicant to the Gothia Cup. The five Tanzanians who recently defected all played for the same team and were born between 1990 and 1993.
Nils Lundqvist, the police inspector in Gothenburg, said, “It’s a common occurrence after Gothia. Every year, we have young people who disappear. There is always a handful, most often from African countries, who take off,” he told the newspaper. Lundquist added that last year an entire team from Libya didn’t return home.
Air Greenland crew planning strike for 23 July
Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
If Air Greenland’s cabin crews go ahead with their planned strike on 23 July, up to 2,000 passengers could be affected. The airline’s website states “After long negotiations the parties have not come up with a satisfactory agreement. Air Greenland has gone very far in trying to find a solution and regret that the situation has come to a conflict.”
In response to the lack of an agreement, Air Greenland activated its strike hotline on 19 July. The carrier said it will attempt to contact affected passengers directly and place them on other flights if possible, according to Sikunews.
If the strike happens, Air Greenland will be forced to cancel virtually all of its flights until things are resolved between the airline and its cabin crew. Nearly 50 per cent of those affected will be travelling within Greenland, which only has a handful of helicopter flights available to compensate for the disrupted domestic travel.
It is expected the strike will cost the airline around one million kroner per day. Christian Keldsen, Air Greenland’s vice-president for sales and marketing, said even though the carrier had offered its cabin crew significant improvements in their work conditions, it was not enough for the employees’ union.
“We have stretched ourselves very far in view of the financial crisis and declining passenger numbers,” Keldsen told Sermitsiaq. “While other airlines negotiated a wage freeze or direct wage cuts, we have offered the cabin crews what amounts to at least a 10 per cent increase in their current salary.”
Too proud for help, not anymore
Tuesday, July 14th, 2009The people of Iceland are being punished for the misbehavior of the countries financial elite
This might come as an surprise to some, Iceland had its share of financial elites, I say had because they are all gone now. Most of them are running away as fast as they can, trying to move all valuables to tax-havens before the government puts a freeze on there assets. Yes, the government of Iceland has yet to freeze any assets since the banking crisis hit almost 10 months ago.
The world never stops to let me down, everything is falling apart, there is no trust left anywhere. Even the Social Democrats who came into power only a few months ago, when Iceland elected its first pure left government, have done nothing but let us down. From a fresh breeze to a rotten old smell of disgusting politics, only a few days are needed to turn a group of decent parliamentarians into pale blood sucking pack of scumbags.
Last summer, If anyone had asked my if Iceland needed help I would have laughed in their face. Help? We don’t need anyone, we have everything right here and more. The investigations into the collapse is going slowly, but these things are complicated, that’s why we have imported help from Norway in the form of Eva Joly. Right now, that’s all the hope I have left in the system, it has come down to a single person almost. If Eva Joly can’t get those bankers, no one can.
We can’t wait for the EU membership, that thing takes years, and why should Iceland join the EU anyway? The other Scandinavian countries have turned there back on us. No help from there, unless we agree to pay billions for the Icesave accounts. Its a fact, the regular Joe’s of Iceland had no clue how the Icelandic banks could offer better interest rates then Deutsche bank. We can’t pay anyway, its just too much for tiny Iceland. The Icelandic Economic Miracle was all a big shame, we know that now, sorry. Please don’t let us pay for the sins of a handful of bankers. They had us for fools.
- Andri Sigurðsson