No country embraced the excesses of the credit bubble as zealously as Iceland but, unlike many of the other nations that went mad for credit, it has lots of things going for it: an average age of 37, a highly educated work force, a nearly positive birthrate, overfunded pension schemes, and abundant natural resources
-Reuters Mon Jun 29, 2009



Few Icelandic businessmen burned out as spectacularly as Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson

Mr Johannesson, was once a celebrity figure in Iceland, having built his father's financial empire from a cut-price domestic supermarket chain called Bonus into the multi-billion pound retail empire, Baugur.

"The Vikings" had risen again -
this was the admiring title the country bestowed upon the small group of very aggressive businessmen whose high-risk investing bloated the island's economy to 10 times its GDP, buying up chunks of the British and Continental European high streets in the process

But, on 17 August 2005, Jón Ásgeir was charged by a court in Reykjavík with 40 counts of breaking the Icelandic penal code, Accounting Act, Annual Accounts Act and Companies Act.
Most of them are related to transactions between him and Baugur.

The Supreme court sent most of the charges back to the Reykjavik district court in the fall of 2005 on the base of technicalities.
The Supreme court made its final ruling in the case in June 2008. Jón Ásgeir got three months suspended sentence although he won public support in Iceland during his lengthy legal battle there.

Following the three-month suspended sentence for false accounting he was disqualified from acting as a director in Iceland and moved the company to the UK.

Baugur fell into administration in February this with estimated debts of more than £1bn, after one of its lenders, Landsbanki, called in a loan.

Like the other popstar 'Viking' businessmen Jón Ásgeir
will have a lost small fortune when his stakes were wiped out during the nationalisations, but few Reykjavik residents have sympathy for those they partly blame for breaking the banks.

"A presenter on an Icelandic TV channel was the first to air this resentment in the only interview Jón Ásgeir has given since the start of the crisis.
"Why won't you sell your penthouse apartment in New York and your yacht?" he asked. "Sell the assets, give the proceeds to the government and take responsibility for this."

Jón Ásgeir maintained he is no longer financially secure for life and played no part in the risk-taking strategy of the banks. But he failed to convince many Icelanders.
"We are angry with the billionaire owners who ran the banks and pretty much everything else in this country and have now disappeared in times of trouble," says editor Bjarni Brynjólfsson, in the English-language Iceland Review.
"We are angry with the authorities who did not step in and demand some securities from the conglomerate banks to prevent this economic meltdown from happening.

"We are angry with ourselves for being foolish and for not having listened to the voices that warned us about the recklessness of the banks."