The President of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, has decided that the latest Icesave bill will be sent to a public referendum.
The president said his decision is based mostly on the fact that there is public support for a referendum and that it is his constitutional responsibility to uphold the public’s will when it differs from parliament’s. He added that the new Icesave bill is clearly much better than the previous one, but that his public responsibility supersedes personal political opinions. As the public was involved in voting for the last Icesave bill; and because parliament has not changed through a general election since; the public should also be involved in the latest decision. This would not be true if there was a strong consensus that Althingi’s decision should stand — but there is no such public consensus today, he said.
This is now the third time the current president has refused to sign a bill into law — the only Icelandic president ever to have used the power.
Asked whether the public should be involved in decisions relating to national debt and budget; the President said that the Icesave issue is much simpler than Iceland’s European Union accession, but everybody agrees that that will go to a public vote. The public should be trusted and listened to, he reasons.
Grimsson told reporters he had decided to send the bill to a vote because only a small majority of parliamentarians voted against the idea, while a large proportion of voters signed the petition calling for a referendum. He does not believe, on the other hand, that rejecting a bill which passed parliament with a strong majority of 44 against 16 effectively undermines the power of the country’s parliament.
The President’s entire speech can be read in English here.
Sweet! This entertainment is easily worth a couple of billion.
To court!
Not very surprising development, considering how this matter has evolved since 2008. Just to iterate, for those that have not followed in detail all the previous twists and turns, the laws authorizing the new IceSave III agreements will, according to the constitution, now immediately become valid. The Icelandic President does NOT have a veto power, only ability to forward any laws to national referendum, if he thinks that is the will of the people. The final acceptance of the agreements, will therefore now lie as before, with the outcome of the referendum by the Icelandic people, which will probably take place within the next few months.
This time around I would give the new agreements a reasonable chance of being accepted in the referendum, but much will depend on how all the different stakeholders will react and behave until then. In the end, the final say in this matter will lie with the Icelandic people, as it always should be.
I have friends living in Iceland and they say that many Icelanders for years have lived beyond their means. Yeah and now we complain, no people put your own house!
The old parliament has given the banks a free hand and guarantees given and she has signed international treaties which it took responsibility. The new parliament has these obligations now, after quite a few revisions, approved. Icelanders have to stop saying that they are not responsible, through their democratic directors they do, like all other countries.
To Mark,
Many people lived beyond their means, both inside and outside Iceland. They are now paying the price, through severe cuts in their salaries, increased loans, and will in the end have to go bankrupt. But that has nothing to do with the IceSave issue.
The people that are fighting against the IceSave agreements (about half the population), are making the case, that there is no governmental guarantee required on private bank liabilities, and they are simply demanding that UK and Netherlands prove it in court.
The other half of the population, seems to be willing to accept this agreement, even though they are not really happy with it. Which half ultimately wins in the national referendum, remains to be seen.
What is now very clear, is that there will be NO IceSave agreement, unless there are laws passed authorizing it, that are then subsequently accepted through a national referendum, according to the Icelandic constitution. Until that happens, constitutionally there is simply no governmental guarantee legally possible for IceSave.
Proposal: let’s make Norge/Noreg pay a considerable amount of Icesave. Only regarding the part Iceland owes Netherlands.
Why ? They took my kronas despite they really didn’t need any (filthy unfriendly grim rich persons, bluh) and I may move to Ned soon :P
An immediate refund, kjære rasistene, takk ^^
I suspect that ORG’s veto is part of a “master plan” by Iceland national strategists.
The new Icesave Agreement is quite reasonable (in comparison, say, to the EU plans forced upon Ireland) and should be approved by the people, in theory.
But really, why bother to approve an Icesave agreement at all? The EU is falling apart and won’t exist after 2013-14, so Iceland has nothing to join. Why bother with the Dutch and English at all? Iceland doesn’t need their approval to join the EU, because the EU won’t exist.
If Iceland agrees to Icesave III, there is always the possibility that the pending lawsuits in UK will decide that creditors have equal or higher priority to Icesave depositors. I think this unlikely, but it is possible. If that were to happen, the bondholders would jump to the head of the line and seize the LB assets in UK and elsewhere, and leave Iceland to be obligated to pay the depositors back.
The only reason to approve an Icesave agreement is to satisfy the IMF and keep the loan payments coming.
If the Icelanders vote no on the referendum, the Icelandic gvernment will say to the IMF, “Look, we tried, we passed Icesave III, but the people said no. What are we supposed to do? Now give us our next IMF loan tranche, thank you very much.”
“The people that are fighting against the IceSave agreements (about half the population), are making the case, that there is no governmental guarantee required on private bank liabilities, and they are simply demanding that UK and Netherlands prove it in court.”
No, they are arguing that government is not liable to guarantee filthy foreigners. The Icelandic race were given a government guarantee at the the expense of the lower life forms even though this contradicts the fundamental principle of the EU.
The Icelandic government has accepted this and voted to pay the debt, they know there absolutely no chance that any court would overturn Iceland’s decision to guarantee bank deposits but for only Icelandic citizens.
The Icesave debt will be a price worth paying to end the EEA agreement and get rid of Iceland and stop its citizens running around robbing other EU members. Recover the debt with import tariffs and we can all be happy.
“The EU is falling apart and won’t exist after 2013-14…”
Wanna bet? That is just about the dumbest thing I have read all day, and believe me, I’ve read a lot of stupid comments since I was reading Icelandic blog pages.
But know this. One of my friends, an Icelander living in the US with a green card, decided yesterday to begin proceedings towards a US citizenship, because of the president’s veto on Sunday. Another friend, currently living in the UK, is also looking into UK citizenship.
Young Icelandic people are not willing to stay on this island to rot, just to fulfill some group’s nationalistic fantasies. If the half of the Icelandic nation that doesn’t want to pay turns out to be the slightly bigger half, the other half will leave while they still can. At least the younger generations will.
>Young Icelandic people are not willing to stay on this island to rot,
And how exactly does joiniing EU or paying IceSave change this situation?
All it does is ( EU member ship ):
–add from 10% to 100% of regulations and all the costs of implemetning them,
–sees our influence within EU in prorportion to our population size under qualified majority voting ( i.e. less than 0.4% ).
And what IceSave III does ( Paying back UK and Dutch governemtns for IceSave deposit insurance of Dutch and British depositor that those governemnts did unilaterally pay ) :
– add between EUR 400 millions up to four times that amount over course of loan to be paid to them.
What voting for IceSave III does do is show that Icelanders do pay they debts, even if those debts are not caused by a legal obligation but moral one for being stupid enough to take the EU banking regulations on faith.
Until Ireland’s government did start the shenanigans to try and save their banks in 2008 by guaranteeing all payments for the two years unlimited for own banks and up to EUR 100K for foreign ones
– then the rest of the main EU member state did follow i.e. Germany and UK — resulting in something that was not state backed before that under EU directives — being suddenly state backed.
And then expecting also Iceland to make their banks deposits state backed too by end of October 2008.
“No, they are arguing that government is not liable to guarantee filthy foreigners. The Icelandic race were given a government guarantee at the the expense of the lower life forms even though this contradicts the fundamental principle of the EU”
The reason why Icelandic depositors were fully guaranteed is that they were paid in our Mickey Mouse currency, the Krona.
We can print as much of this as we want, this money printing to fill the vaults of the banks in the bank run that accompanied a total meltdown of our entire banking system probably fueled to some degree the raging inflation we had for a couple of years after the crash.
The UK was on the brink of a complete meltdown, that is the reason why UK decided to compensate all the savers fully and then send the bill to Icelandic taxpayers, they did this to save their own asses.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,746939,00.html
“SPIEGEL: We’re talking about Wednesday, Oct. 8, 2008. Lehman Brothers had just filed for bankruptcy. In your new book “Beyond the Crash,” you write: “I sensed that if no one acted, total collapse was imminent.” What exactly were you expecting?
Brown: The Royal Bank of Scotland would have collapsed within hours. HBOS was not far behind, and in that case, other European and American banks would have followed. I think people still misunderstand, in retrospect, the scale of the collapse that we were facing: It would have been absolutely catastrophic.”
Brown managed to kick the can down the road for now, the future is not looking good though.
>The UK was on the brink of a complete meltdown, that is the reason why UK decided to compensate all the savers fully and then send the bill to Icelandic taxpayers, they did this to save their own asses.
Yes, although of course Iceland is not being given the full bill for that compenation. Just the first 20,887 euros per depositor.
This video should be required viewing for all Icelanders intending to vote. Not because Lee Buchheit makes the case one way or the other, but because he quantifies all of the relevant issues. Well worth listening to in the background for the full 50 mins.
http://www.visir.is/buchheit-um-nyju-samningana—myndband/article/2011110229682
“The UK was on the brink of a complete meltdown, that is the reason why UK decided to compensate all the savers fully and then send the bill to Icelandic taxpayers, they did this to save their own asses.”
The reason Icesave was set-up, with the support of the Icelandic government was to ‘save the asses’ of the Icelandic banking system which were close to collapse after 2006. Its was pointed out that this was a serious mistake at the time but your bankers choose to ignore that.
The depositors savings were not Iceland’s to be spent as it wished but had to be repaid ON DEMAND.
What a president?
Can he not make decisions by himself?
Surely a President knows the condition of the economy, country and financial obligations better than any citizen?
Must the Icelanders vote for every decision made by government?
Why were the public not informed of the fraud been taken in the banks?
Why were the investors not warned that things were not well in the Icelandic banks?
Why were the onvestors like myself given Bond guarantees knowing very well that Iceland could not even sustain itself?
Please do not allow Iceland into the EU and seize their embassies and sell their assets to pay the Bond creditors.
That is the one law that will work.
I smell a rat here.
Greek people their way, Tunisian and Lybian people their ways, Iceland people their way – Stand-up, all the peoples, for your rights ! Go on, Iceland !
“>The EU is falling apart and won’t exist after 2013-14 ”
Yes, Anna what Axel said is bit over blown — but not far from reality as EUphile propogandists would like.
What is sure is that the current European Union model of Economic and Monetary Union is unlikely to exist by 2015.
Once the problems of the Portugese and Spanish problems fully manifest — particularly the bad loan problems of many Spanish banks which are in many case zombie banks now because of coastal properties and developers.
Then either of the following is likely to happen :
i. EU manderins do Save The World by forcing harmonization of everything significant under EU commission in Brussels — tax policy and spending policy of Euro zone states.
( through caps on spending and borrowing targets with real sanctions this time against the states that transgress to dispoil the Euro in the bond markets )..
OR
ii. Weaker countries in EURozone are forced out and the EUROzone remains the strong countries. THis can be done technically because each country still keeps its own central bank and issues its Euro paper money and own coins.
Already we have seen some in Germany refusing Euros printed in other weaker EURzone states. And that comes to core of issue.
If German voters do decide they have had enough of this bailing out everyone else in EuroZone then scenario II. is most likely.
Or it could be both — as aim of the EU architects right from start of EUro is they do want ever closer concentration of power in brussells over economys of Eurozone.
As to Iceland, it simply will stay in EFTA and out of Euro. It may adopt euro in future unilaterally but Krona will do fine for next years.
There is more chance that the UK will leave EU and join EFTA which it founded than for EU to leave EFTA to join EU.
The UK is unliklely to fall into the Euro, as William Hague did say before that the Euro and EMU that does underpin it needed to be tested in ” bad times as well as good “.
( The thing that the horrible Brown did right was keeping UK out of Euro — although every thing else in policy areas except the indepennce making of the Bank of England on the New Zealand model was done wrong by him. )
Just like the EU banking regulatiosn that did prove to have a ” system error ” that unfortunately was exposed by the IceSave saga, it has been designed in way that guaranteed the failure we now see.
Deliberate of the architets of EMU? Maybe. But more likely just simple EU burecratic incompetence.
Why do they care if it works or not? They do get theyy nice fat salaries and expenses to abuse regard less.
They don’t pay for the mistakes unlike the tax payer of the the states that do bank roll the EU project from their pockets.
As published other places but not here at IceNews..
” When asked about Grímsson’s comments on RÚV’s political chat program Silfur Egils on Sunday that he had made threats against the president, Sigfússon said he wouldn’t speak of confidential conversations.
Grímsson also stated that ministers had threatened to resign and even that the entire cabinet would step down if he didn’t confirm the Icesave legislation. ”
it seems old fist shaking Steingrímur is still alive, just hes learned from spin doctors of Social Democrats to keep it out of media spot light.
The Red-Green coalition just have no honor. They should have resigned many times before now.
Please step down.. Majority of voters would welcome the chance to vote for a new bunch of politician losers.
Most active and posts on this subject now are over here :
http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2011/02/21/icesave-puts-icelandic-president-in-world-spotlight-once-again/
I Fisy wrote :
” What is sure is that the current European Union model of Economic and Monetary Union is unlikely to exist by 2015. ”
Just to give perspective in numbers of why I have for so long over last 2 years talking of Spain and the deep problems of its banks more than the other countries :
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/news/zombie-buildings-likely-to-undermine-spans-economy-for-years/story-e6frg90x-1225924726566
” With a $US1.3 trillion ($1.4 trillion) economy, Spain is the fourth-biggest economy using the euro, accounting for about 11 per cent of the zone’s overall output.
Europe’s other teetering economies, Greece, Ireland and Portugal, together account for roughly 6 per cent. “