Former premier Geir Haarde said Monday he could not be held responsible for the collapse of Iceland‘s banks in 2008 as he became the first politician to be tried in connection with the global financial crisis.
“I reject all accusations, and believe there is no basis for them,” Haarde, 60, told the court in a calm and confident voice as he took the stand.
Haarde, who headed the right-leaning Independence Party and was prime minister from mid-2006 to early 2009 when his coalition was ousted amid public uproar over the crisis, has previously dismissed the case as a farce.
He is being tried by Landsdomur, a never-before used special court for current and ex-ministers, on charges of failing to properly oversee Iceland’s financial institutions.
He rejected the allegations, insisting Monday that “only in hindsight is it evident that not everything was as it should have been.”
Haarde was one of four former Icelandic government ministers blamed in a 2010 report for contributing to the country‘s stunning financial sector collapse in late 2008, when all its major banks, which at the time held assets equal to 923 percent of gross domestic product, failed in a matter of weeks.
But parliament, now majority-held by Haarde’s left-leaning opponents, voted in September 2010 that he was the only one who should be tried for the collapse, including the online Icesave bank implosion that spawned a fiery diplomatic row with Britain and the Netherlands.
In addition to Haarde, the so-called “Truth Report” published in April 2010 cited the former ministers for finance and banking, as well as David Oddsson, another former prime minister who was head of Iceland‘s central bank at the time.
The heads of the failed banks and the former chief of the country’s Financial Supervisory Authority were also handed a large portion of the blame.
According to the report, Haarde and Oddsson, withheld information in the spring of 2008 from relevant ministers and from the government indicating that the country was headed for a major financial crisis.
Asked about a warning by former foreign minister Ingibjoerg Solrun Gisladottir at a meeting in February 2008 that the banks were too big for the Icelandic economy, Haarde insisted Monday that “the banks were not requesting help from the government at that point.”
“The possibility was not raised in that meeting that only six months later the banks would all go bankrupt,” he said.
The banking failure plunged Iceland into a deep recession, prompting a 2.1-billion-dollar bailout from the International Monetary Fund, and sending the value of its krona spiraling.
But the country‘s economy has since returned to growth and is expected to expand 3.1 percent this year, according to the national statistics agency.
In an interview with AFP in July, Haarde insisted the whole trial was “a political farce motivated by some old political enemies who are cloaking this farce under the cover of a political trial.”
“We saved the country from going bankrupt,” he said in the interview.
Last October, the court threw out the most serious charge of “gross neglect.”
But Haarde still stands accused of, among other things, showing inaction in reducing the size of the bloated banks, and failing to ensure that the Icesave accounts in Britain and the Netherlands were split off into subsidiary companies in those countries.
“I think it’s illogical to think that I or anyone else in the government could have reduced the size of the banks to a greater extent than was done at the time,” he insisted Monday.
If found guilty Haarde faces up to two years in prison.
The trial is set to last until March 15. No date has been set for the verdict. (AFP)
