On Thursday, Iceland’s Supreme Court found nine bankers guilty of market manipulation, affirming the conviction of the seven defendants found in a June 2015 decision by the Reykjavik District Court, and handing down a guilty verdict to two defendants previously acquitted in district court.
The Supreme Court decision found that “[b]y fully financing share purchases with no other surety than the shares themselves, the bankers were accused of giving a false and misleading impression of demand for Kaupthing shares by means of deception and pretense,” according to the Iceland Monitor.
The bankers were found guilty of crimes relating to deceitfully financing share purchases – essentially the bank lent money for the purchase of the shares while using its own shares as collateral for the loans.
According to a report by Common Dreams:
No punishment has been handed down yet, although sentencing is set to come. The defendants worked at the major international firm Kaupthing Bank until it was taken over by the Icelandic government during the crash. The bank’s former director Hreiðar Már Sigurðsson, who had been sentenced to five and a half years in 2013 in a separate Kaupthing case, had his punishment extended by six months in response to the verdict.
The acquittals were overturned for former Kaupthing credit representative Björk Þórarinsdóttir and former Kaupthing Luxembourg CEO Magnús Guðmundsson, although no penalties have been meted out for them.
In 2015, Iceland sentenced dozens of bankers to a combined 74 years in prison for crimes relating to market manipulation. The majority of those convicted were sentenced to prison terms of two to five years. The maximum penalty in Iceland for financial crimes is six years.
The prosecution of Icelandic banksters stems from the manipulation of the Iceland’s financial markets after the deregulation of the finance sector in 2001. Eventually, an accumulation of foreign debt resulted in a meltdown of the entire banking sector in 2008.
Massive debts were incurred in the name of the Icelandic public, to allow the country to continue to function, which are still being repaid to the IMF and other nations eight years later by the citizens of Iceland. In contrast to the U.S., Iceland has chosen to hold some of the criminals that manipulated their financial system accountable under the law.
In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Iceland gained a global reputation for corporate accountability, in stark contrast to the to the United States, which saw a record low number of prosecutions of CEOs and high-level financial executives. In the U.S., not a single banking executive was charged with crimes related to the 2008 financial crisis, even though the U.S. itself precipitated the global crisis.
Icelandic President, Olafur Ragnar Grimmson, summed it up best in his response when asked how his country recovered from the global financial crisis.
We were wise enough not to follow the traditional prevailing orthodoxies of the Western financial world in the last 30 years. We introduced currency controls, we let the banks fail, we provided support for the people and didn’t introduce austerity measures like you’re seeing in Europe.
As noted above, America has done the exact opposite. In 2008, after Congress bailed out the failing American banks to the tune of $700 billion dollars, courtesy of the American taxpayer, many of the executives of institutions that received TARP bailout funds ended up getting large bonuses – not jail!
The prosecution of the Icelandic banksters represents an accountability that does not exist in the United States of America. It seems clear that the international financial “Masters of the Universe” are the ones that truly control the political apparatus in the U.S., making it painfully obvious that there is no one who is going to hold them accountable for manipulating and crashing the financial markets.
Please share this article to help expose who really controls the political system in the United States!!
Jay Syrmopoulos writes for TheFreeThoughtProject.com, where this article first appeared.
The bankers in the US are the ones who fund the elected people running for office. IF they jailed the bankers, this money would dry up and the elected people would not have it so easy
Now, they should be required to pay back four times restitution to those they bilked, per Exodus 22:1. If they are unable to meet this obligation, they should be sold into indentured servitude until their debt is paid, per Exodus 22:3. Let the same be done here in America.
For more on how Yahweh’s triune moral law (His Ten Commandments and their respective statutes and judgments) apply today, see free online book “Law and Kingdom: Their Relevance Under the New Covenant.” Click on my picture, then our website. Go to our Online Books list and scroll down to title.
IMF: International Mafia Funds
We KNOW who benefited from the banksters contributions — Hillary Clinton. Now people want to put her in a position that she can steal more money from the American people through the crooked banking system. I guess some people are just too stupid to learn from past mistakes.
Well at least there is Justice somewhere in the World.
Fantastic this is what needs to happen all over the world round them up and toss them in the clink especially the private bankers who run this scam of charging you interest on money that does not exist. Good to see a country that has the guts to take on these parasites. It will happen they need not think they can continue crashing the economy and sucking away your hard earned wealth. a day is coming soon when these parasites will be dragged kicking and screaming out of their ivory towers. The people will deal with them and it is going to be worse than being skinned alive. The government can id they have the will to do it, is wipe out all debt start fresh.
Maybe we could export a few of these bankster criminals from this country, pay for their time in jail before their trials there and then pay the Icelandic govt (who seems adept at id’ing and trying in a court financial criminals like Wall Street seems full of), for the final billing on the trial costs and how much their incarceration would be estimated to cost. Who knows but maybe it would start balancing out that trade deficit of ours after exporting HUNDREDS of these bankster criminals out of this country and ship them off to Iceland for their final…disposition in prison. Financially and morally we’d finally be able to declare victory over these globalist, warmongering neocon scum and they’d get what they deserve as well.
…The magnanimity of the people of Iceland parallels the 1% of us that are ‘Awake’…diametrically opposed to the 0.01%>1% ponerological pyramid cap of the globalist pathocratic vipers… that allow their sociopath minion ‘banksta-gangstas’ free reign to blatantly steal $$$ from the 99%….satanic inversion is key here (imo)
Amen, Brother
It sure would bring a smile to my face. Wake every morning and realize the true creetens of the zentral banks have been dropped over the ocean.
There would be a thousand years of peace and prosperity.
I have been what the Idiots from both sides of the 1 party coin think are deplorables since I left this bed of lies and deceit and the republisocialist party 25 years ago. I like freedom, I Like Liberty, I Believe in a Strong Defense (not offense like the hawks from both democommunist and republisocialist side of the coin) THE US needs to stay out of other nations problems and come to understand we have enough of our own to take care of. The idea of power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, kick em all out of office, and let’s go back to idea of citizen public servants, hmm novel concept that the founding fathers thought of, too bad most people have been dumbed down by the federal indoctrination industry called the Department of education.
The US is nothing more than a giant crime syndicate run by the American Bar Association and the black robe psychopathic judiciary for the benefit of the crown temple and the Jesuit puppet masters in Rome! Everything is corrupt and will self destruct soon! That POS Scalia was a pedophile and was sacraficed on the altar of PC cultural insanity.