Kaupthing commercials starring John Cleese…I especially like the part where he asks why doesn’t Kaupthing just call everyone instead of making those commercials because that’s what we were also doing. A lot of fuzz was made regarding the cost of having such a famous actor appear in commercials for an Icelandic bank at the time. [...]

Imagine that you put all your life savings into a bank, perhaps even the proceeds from the sale of your house, for safe keeping and one morning you woke up to the nightmare news that the bank had closed its doors and you couldn’t have your money. On October 8th 2008, that’s exactly what happened [...]

Has anyone thought of this yet? In 2004, Kaupthing brought the first mortgages by a commercial bank to the Icelandic market. Glitnir and Landsbanki soon followed, as did the Savings&Loans and some smaller financial institutions. In the first couple of weeks after Kaupthing’s announcement, Glitnir and Landsbankinn were practically in shock. A customer calling his [...]

When he was voted in a highly organised coop, the chairman of the Progressive party, he no longer spoke on behalf of the group. He was still seen with them and plays a very important part there. Or should we say that the group plays an important part in his politics.  The Indefence group not [...]

Still licking its wounds after the collapse of its economy, Iceland finds itself confronting the ghosts of a grim financial past after a confidential report implicating the nation’s largest bank of irresponsible lending was leaked on the Internet. The 210-page internal report intended for the board of Kaupthing Bank appeared on the whistleblower site Wikileaks.org [...]

It would seem to be a presentation to the senior management of Kaupthing and covers loans made by that group including by their operations in Iceland, the United Kingdom and Luxembourg. Over 210 pages it lists something like 205 entities that owed more than €6bn. What is extraordinary about this document is that it represents [...]

The Serious Fraud Office has asked people who have inside knowledge of Kaupthing to step forward, following the leak of the bank’s loan book on the Wikileaks website over the weekend. The SFO says it is still deciding whether to launch an official investigation into Icelandic banks and the inquiry is still at the ‘research [...]

Separately, the Serious Fraud Office is understood to have contacted Eva Joly, the Icelandic government’s fraud consultant, in the hope of arranging a meeting. The SFO is in the process of gathering intelligence on Kaupthing in London, where two-thirds of its corporate loan clients were based. From the Telegraph

“Politicians looking for their 15 minutes of fame have to understand that the lifting of bank-secrecy means nothing else but a mass exodus of Icelandic customers to foreign financial institutions as soon as they have the chance to do so, with the accompanying damage for the Icelandic economy”. - Sigurdur Einarsson, former Kaupthing CEO in [...]

Details of loans made by failed Icelandic bank Kaupthing to a company owned by British retail entrepreneur Kevin Stanford have been sent to criminal investigators in Iceland by the local financial regulator amid allegations of market manipulation before the bank’s collapse last October. The focus of the allegations concerns whether Kaupthing entered into transactions that [...]