Euromoney Magazine http://www.euromoney.com/Print.aspx?ArticleID=2406144

The failed state of

Elliot Wilson

Friday, March 05, 2010 The full horror of the country’s bank-led collapse is still emerging. A new generation of regulators is trying to sort out the mess as prosecutors attempt to bring the perpetrators to justice but, as Elliot Wilson discovers in Reykjavik, there’s a long road ahead to recovery. IN A WORLD where international reputations seem to topple like dominoes every few months – Greece being the latest casualty – it’s worth stepping back in time to the mother of all financial disasters. When Iceland’s banking sector disintegrated in autumn 2008 it spelled the end for the nation’s big three lenders – Kaupthing, and Landsbanki – creating the greatest banking collapse relative to economic size in history. But it did much more. It shredded a tiny nation’s hard-won economic reputation in a heartbeat. It bankrupted hundreds of Icelandic firms, many of which had grown fat and rich with cheap loans from local banks. Worst of all it impoverished tens of thousands of poorly advised (and often greedy) consumers, who are now deeply in debt and bitter towards everyone – bankers, politicians, regulators and the entire global financial system that allowed Iceland to fly so high before burning up and falling to Earth. While the eyes of the world are elsewhere, it’s interesting to see how a new generation of politicians and regulators in Reykjavik, backed by a coterie of teak-tough international advisers, are seeking to scrape the country’s tattered economy off the floor. First, a quick trip to the recent past. For most of the 2000s Iceland’s bank expansion knew literally no bounds. By 2008 the economy – sustained outside the financial sector by 320,000 people engaged in tourism, steel production and fish exports – was worth IKr1.47 trillion ($11.4 billion). The same year assets at the big three banks had reached nearly IKr15 trillion, with borrowings of IKr6.35 trillion. The ratio of foreign liabilities of the leading banks to GDP had topped nine times in Iceland – higher than the ratio in Switzerland, a nation built on banking and with a robust currency of its own. Between 2000 and 2007 GDP grew by 130% How big is big? – a rate that nearly equalled China’s rapid growth, according to figures from Iceland’s Failure of three largest Icelandic banks stock regulator, the Financial Supervisory superimposed on the largest US corporate Authority (FME). Housing prices jumped 75% bankruptcies between 2004 and 2008, while disposable Rank Firm Year Type Assets income rose 73% between 2000 and 2007. ($bln) Everything rested on the strength – or lack 1Lehman 2008 Investment bank 691 thereof – of the nation’s banks: when they Brothers went kaput, so did the entire Icelandic 2 Washington 2008 Savings and loans 328 economy. Kaupthing’s bankruptcy alone Mutual would have placed number five on the list of the largest US corporate failures in history; 3 WorldCom 2002 Telecommunications 104 added together, the failure of Iceland’s 4 General 2009 Auto manufacturing 91 biggest banks was equivalent to the third- Motors largest bankruptcy in US history, behind only 5 Kaupthing 2008 Commercial/investment 83 Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual. Bank bank Invisible regulation 6 CIT Group 2009 Bank holding company 80 Who, then, was regulating Iceland’s out-of-control banks? Simply 7 Enron 2001 Energy trading 66 put, the answer is no one – or at least, no one worth mentioning. By late 2007 Iceland had essentially become a financial banana 8 Conseco 2002 Financial services 61 republic. The FME had long been a cipher, offering empty platitudes about financial supervision. Its offices sit in the distant 9 Landsbanki 2008 Commercial/investment 50 outskirts of Iceland’s capital, anonymously nestled at the back of a Islands bank ramshackle office building and above a Chinese noodle shop. They could not be farther – literally or metaphorically – from the 10 Glitnir Bank 2008 Commercial/investment 49 gleaming steel-and-glass waterfront real estate chosen by leading bank local banks, most based a stone’s throw from government offices and Reykjavik’s retail centres. Source: FME There was a good reason for this distance. For one, Iceland’s bank chairmen and chief executives resented what one former senior banking official still describes as "unnecessary meddling" by people who knew "next to nothing" about the brave new world carved out by gung-ho lenders. During the boom years, anyone with an ounce of financial nous was swiftly hired out of the FME by one of the big lenders. That left behind largely the halt, the lame and the clueless, headed by a man overly interested in palling around with bank executives. The bonhomie between Kaupthing’s ex-chief executive, Sigurdur Einarsson, and the former FME director general, Jónas Fr Jónsson, was too cosy even for some of the latter’s staffers. According to one, Jónsson would settle down on the sofa when entering Einarsson’s office and chat about the weather, sports, foreign travel –

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anything but high finance. "Jónsson was a chinless wonder," says a state official insider. "He was best friends with most of the top bank execs – his was a rather ceremonial role, involving cheerleading for the banks, rather than supervising them." Gunnar Andersen, the current FME director general, appointed in April 2009, is far harder nosed than his passive predecessor. A former managing director of international banking and treasury at Landsbanki, Andersen left his post in late 2002, just days after the Icelandic government’s executive committee on privatization sold its 45.8% stake in Landsbanki to Samson Holding, a little-known investment group headed by three enormously wealthy Icelanders who had made their fortunes in Russia’s cut-throat brewing industry. "It’s a story of incompetence. It’s a story of That group was headed by Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson and his father Björgólfur Gudmundsson, hillbillyism and delusions of grandeur. It’s a a man connected to two corporate scandals that rocked Iceland in the mid-1980s involving the story of babes in the woods and narrow- shipping line Hafskip and the near-collapse of Utvegsbanki, Iceland’s fisheries bank. To that list minded country bumpkins. And it’s a story of he can now add West Ham United, the English football club Gudmundsson bought, then brought disastrous management and alleged serious to the brink, and Landsbanki – the septuagenarian was chairman of the board of the Icelandic criminality" lender when it filed for a $50 billion bankruptcy in October 2008. Gunnar Andersen, FME Many now connect that sale – which placed control of a venerable 124-year-old banking institution in the hands of a group of questionable investors – with the unfettered Icelandic financial expansion that followed, lasting just six years and culminating in the emergency renationalization of the entire first-tier banking sector. Yet the sale of Landsbanki eight years ago raised surprisingly few dissenting voices. One of the very few came from Euromoney, which in a November 2002 article questioned whether this father-and-son outfit was a "suitable choice" to control such an important component of the Icelandic economy (Questions over Landsbanki's new shareholder, Euromoney, November 2002). Delusions of grandeur Sat in his brightly lit, somewhat Spartan offices, the intense and driven FME chief – who many believe left Landsbanki in protest at the Samson sale – doesn’t mince words when asked to describe the torrid tale of his country’s failed banking sector. "It’s a story of incompetence," Andersen says. "It’s a story of hillbillyism and delusions of grandeur. It’s a story of babes in the woods and narrow-minded country bumpkins. And at the tail end it’s a story of disastrous management and alleged serious criminality. "The collapse of the banks revealed serious weaknesses in their information systems. Their management was... a shambles. They seem often to have financed the deals they were doing with little or no equity components, thus assuming enormous risk but with little protection for any downside. One assumes that the bank CEOs and chairmen must have known the crash was coming for some years, but they carried on anyway." Andersen notes that in the six years to October 2008 the assets of banks supervised by the FME grew by 554% while the regulatory body’s staffing numbers less than doubled. Turnover soared as quality personnel were headhunted by banks: in 2005 fully one-quarter of FME staff left the body. "The image of the FME was damaged by this and we haven’t recovered yet," he says. Yet such gloom seems a deliberate undersell by the studiedly pragmatic Andersen, who is clearly determined to boost both headcount and budgets. For now the Althing, Iceland’s parliament, seems only too happy to accommodate most demands, even as state spending on health, education and national security plummets. The FME budget jumped 25% in 2010 over 2009 figures and is widely expected to rise further. Bigger budgets are justified in part by higher supervisory fees imposed on regulated entities by the FME, which rose 49% year on year in 2010. So far Andersen has invested wisely. Auditors Deloitte and international consultants Oliver Wyman were hired to deliver a no-holds-barred report highlighting FME deficiencies. A forensic accounting (FA) division was established in late 2009, employing public accountants and, Andersen hopes, former policemen all blessed with "a healthy degree of scepticism". A group leader, most probably a financial forensics expert, is soon set to join the five-strong team, seen internally as something akin to a CSI: Reykjavik. The first group member formally joined the FME on February 15; Andersen hopes to boost the FA team to eight members over the next few years. What marks tiny Iceland out here is the country’s almost total absence, until the crash, of any semblance of an institutional regulatory framework. Simply put, the FME existed largely in name only for much of the past decade. At no point did it hint to banks that they might take their foot off the accelerator pedal; any voice within the FME suggesting the application of a handbrake was shouted down. Regulatory ineptness was hardly the sole preserve of the FME. London’s Financial Services Authority failed to cover itself in glory throughout the episode. But the Darwin award for maladroit incompetence surely goes to Nout Wellink, the Netherlands’ central bank chief, who in early February 2010 told a Dutch parliamentary committee that Icelandic regulators had "lied" to him about the state of the country’s banks just days before they collapsed. Grilled about the failure of Icesave, the online arm of Landsbanki, which folded in October 2008 owing €3.9 billion to UK and Dutch depositors, Wellink complained that FME officials in Reykjavik had showered him with elaborate claims about the strapping state of Iceland’s banks. In a moment destined to secure Wellink a ticket to the quote-of-the-year party, the Netherlands’ chief financial administrator complained that the FME wove tales about the "strength of the Icelandic economy over the long term... Geysers, fish, everything was put on the table". The blame game So what happens now? The next step for Iceland is to reach closure on two key issues: censuring, fining and even jailing those responsible for bankrupting a nation; and coming to terms with the virtual annihilation of a painstakingly assembled international reputation. The latter will take time. Iceland’s population remains in denial about the cause of the damage, with some pointing at bankers and politicians, and others at international governments, notably the UK, which invoked terrorism regulations against Reykjavik when Icesave collapsed, freezing banking assets within British jurisdiction.

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Many local observers blame global ratings agencies – "We have had very neglecting to note that Icelandic banks, awash with cash, good cooperation with rarely if ever sought such imprimaturs. In 2005 alone the big the Serious Fraud Office since October, when the three lenders raised $11.2 billion in debt: two-thirds in euros SFO announced it would with the rest in a bewildering mishmash of currencies investigate formally Kaupthing Bank and its including the Mexican peso, Hungarian forint and Slovak activities in the UK" koruna. Standard & Poor’s was only ever asked to work with Ólafur Thór Hauksson, one lender, Glitnir: its rating started out low, in March 2006, at Special Prosecutor’s single-A minus, and fell steadily. By March 2008, six months Office before it collapsed, Glitnir had the unenviable reputation for being tarred with the lowest S&P rating on any western European bank. Indridi Thorlaksson, political adviser to the Icelandic finance minister and a former national tax chief, has "bitter feelings towards" the bankers for the mess Iceland is in, yet also blames the country’s politicians for "shaping the [country’s] financial environment in a way that led inevitably to disaster" and continuing to blame only the outside world. Even the country’s remaining bankers are afflicted with self-loathing. The headquarters of Íslandsbanki (the new name for failed Glitnir Bank) on Reykjavik’s waterfront is a sombre place these days, particularly in the dead of winter, when the skies darken in the early afternoon scant hours after sunrise. During one meeting with senior officials at Íslandsbanki there is a general lament that a banking career is now seen in the same light as tuberculosis or leprosy. "Some bankers don’t want people to know they are going to work in a bank, so they don’t put on a suit and tie until they arrive," says one. Prosecuting those responsible for Iceland’s failed banks might take years. Multiple state agencies are scrutinizing thousands of cases of potential fraud. The Special Prosecutor’s Office, charged with identifying specific cases of market manipulation, unethical business practices, insider trading and book-cooking, is headed by Ólafur Thór Hauksson, a fearless, 45-year-old public administrator and former finance ministry official. So far Hauksson has been sent 60 cases to investigate involving specific allegations of market manipulation or outright fraud. He says 15 have been dismissed or sent to other investigators, notably the police, leaving 45 cases active. "At the end of the investigation, we need to decide whether to continue with each case or not," Hauksson told Euromoney. "We will make a decision on that... by the end of April [2010]." Under the microscope — SIC letters The Special Investigation Committee meanwhile, set up on December 30 2008, is charged with Politicians and government officials who reporting on the wider implications of Iceland’s have received letters from the Special banking collapse, and identifying those individuals Investigation Committee examining the crash most complicit in either pursuing financial and events leading up to it include: wrongdoing or permitting it to happen under their Geir Haarde former prime minister noses. Headed by Páll Hreinsson, a supreme court justice, the SIC was expected to deliver its Ingibjörg Sólrún former minister of foreign main report to the Althing in November 2009, Gísladóttir affairs although that deadline has slipped twice, into Árni Matthiesen former minister of finance February and then early March 2010. Björgvin G Sigðursson former minister of commerce That’s partly because the report itself has grown in size in recent weeks – former head of the FME from 1,500 pages at the turn of the year, to 2,000 by end-January – as Jónas Fr Jónsson more cases are uncovered, broadening the investigation. On February 14, (Financial Services Authority) Icelandic media outlet DV revealed that 12 individuals had been sent letters current deputy ministry of by the SIC as part of its investigation into the involvement and role of Jónína S Lárusdóttir politicians and government officials – but, as yet, not bankers – in the commerce events leading up to the crash of 2008. Davíd Oddsson former director, central bank The list includes: Geir Haarde, the former prime minister, and his deputy Bolli Thór Bollason; three former ministers, including finance chief Árni Ingimundur former director, central bank Matthiesen; Davíd Oddsson, one-time central bank head and now editor- Fridriksson in-chief of Iceland’s leading newspaper, Morgunbladid; and three former central bank directors, one from each of the three leading Icelandic Eiríkur Gudnason former director, central bank political parties. Indeed all of the dirty dozen have moved on from their Baldur Gudlaugsson former deputy finance minister jobs – or been sacked or voted out of office – bar the deputy commerce minister Jónína S Lárusdóttir. deputy in former premier Bolli Thór Bollason Several other bodies are charged with investigating fraud, including the Haarde’s office FME, the country’s competition authority, the tax and internal revenue authorities (Ríkisskattstjór and the even more glottal Skattrannsóknarstjóri respectively) and the white-collar crime division of the Icelandic police force, headed by Helgi Magnús Gunnarsson. Named and shamed Since May 2009, the FME has sent what it considers to be 30 clear-cut cases of market manipulation – the worst involving the illicit ramping-up of fund values to entice investors – to the Special Prosecutor’s Office; FME chief Andersen predicts that by end-2010 that number will have at least doubled. The SPO declines to state how many cases will ultimately be brought to trial. But the phrase that has pinballed around Reykjavik over the past year is "30 men and three women", referring to those most complicit in market manipulation practices. That list, however, seems to grow by the day. It will almost certainly include the chairmen and chief executives of the big three failed banks, along with bank directors and, insiders say, many of the heads of risk and credit committees at leading lenders, along with a smattering of current cabinet ministers. The former Kaupthing chief executive, Sigurdur Einarsson, for example, is reported by the Icelandic media to be an official suspect for the SPO in relation to an investment in the failed bank by Qatari royal Sheikh Mohammed Bin Khalifa Al-Thani. That deal, involving the acquisition of

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5.01% of Kaupthing by one of Al-Thani’s holding firms, Q Iceland, took place in September 2008, weeks before Kaupthing was nationalized. Also on the list will likely be those top Icelandic businessmen who borrowed most heavily from complicit bank chiefs when seeking to buy local and, particularly, foreign assets. That list could well include the likes of Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson, the chief executive of the rapacious , which spent much of the past decade buying stakes in British retailers, from Hamleys and House of Fraser to Debenhams and the Iceland frozen food chain. Another name in the frame could be Ingibjörg Stefania Pálmadóttir, the long-time chair of Stodir (formerly FL Group), which was placed in administration in September 2008 after the nationalization of its banking partner, Glitnir. After spinning off one of its assets – the 70-year-old airline and logistics firm Group – in 2006, Stodir transformed itself into an investment group and started investing heavily (and unwisely) in carriers across the world, including and American Airlines. "[Stodir] was an unmitigated disaster," sniffs one Icelandic official. "They lost a lot of money in most of their deals. They were backed with so much banking money, they thought they were in the same league as Berkshire Hathaway." Other companies set to come under intense investigation over the coming months include Fons, headed by Palmi Haraldsson and Johannes Kristinsson, the former owners of domestic carrier Iceland Express and a troubled Danish rival, . Then there is Gnupur, a privately held investment firm headed by chief executive Thordur Mar Johannesson, which at its height owned vast swathes of Iceland’s economy, including large stakes in Kaupthing and Stodir. One Icelandic banker notes: "You have funds and funds of funds, but Gnupur was a fund of funds of funds. It was not a good cocktail." Regulators and white-collar forensic fraud experts across the world are still trying to untangle a complex network of failed Icelandic investments: local firms spent years buying office buildings in Kazakhstan, hotels in Mexico and Florida, gambling halls in Macau, and industrial facilities in Ukraine. Throughout late 2008 and most of 2009, one of Reykjavik’s big grievances has been a perceived lack of willingness by foreign territories – notably the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) in the UK – to freeze the assets of wealthy Icelanders connected to continuing SPO-related fraud or corruption cases. Many rich Icelanders chose to squirrel their earnings away in London over recent years. Those concerns started to dissipate on January 26 this year, when the SPO in alliance with the SFO raided eight locations in Iceland and four in the UK as part of an investigation into Exista, a holding company set up in 2001 to own shares in Kaupthing Bank. The following year ownership of Exista was sold to another holding company owned by Ágúst and Lýdur Gudmundsson. The Icelandic arm of the probe will deal with Exista’s sale of its 39.6% stake in Bakkavör Group in 2008 to a firm also owned by the Gudmundssons, and Exista’s unilateral decision to boost its share capital by just shy of $400 million. On the UK side, the SFO will probe the sale of shares owned by Exista in the listed UK retailer JJB Sports. The SFO refused to return calls placed to their offices referring to issues raised by this story. "We have had very good cooperation with the SFO since October [2009], when the SFO announced it would investigate formally Kaupthing Bank and its activities in the UK," says Iceland’s chief prosecutor Hauksson. "In the case [of Exista] it was the work of 80 police officers, 40 in Iceland and 40 in Great Britain, working on searches of private houses and offices." Early-warning raids have also been carried out in recent weeks by the FME, in alliance with Magnús Gunnarsson’s white-collar crime division. "We’re investigating violations of foreign exchange laws [such as] cross-border movements of capital, and have so far referred eight cases to the police," says FME chief Andersen. "Several other cases are being investigated. Some of the cases involve amounts substantial enough to affect the exchange rate of the Icelandic krónur. We work on this with the central bank on the basis of a cooperation agreement." The corruption crusaders The SPO itself got off to an uncertain start. Chief prosecutor Hauksson was not the government’s first choice. Several other, more prominent public officials are understood to have been considered, then dismissed, mostly due to personal or family connections to controversial or failed local firms. Yet once chosen, Hauksson built up a cosmopolitan international team with the stamina and the nerve to prosecute wealthy and powerful vested interests. He moved quickly to hire Eva Joly, a Franco-Norwegian European member of parliament and corruption-crusader who has taken on and won several prominent corporate fraud cases, notably those involving former French minister Bernard Tapie, Crédit Lyonnais and oil firm Elf Aquitaine. Joly in turn hired Jean-Michel Matt, a corporate fraud specialist at private French investigation firm Cofisys, and Norwegian lawyer Helge Berg, of the Oslo-based legal firm Lynx. Both worked on the Elf and CL cases with Joly. Neither Berg or Matt, nor Joly, agreed to talk to Euromoney on the record, although individuals close to all three talked on background during the writing of this story. Joly’s position on the Icelandic banking crisis is clear. In a series of articles in 2009 written for French newspaper Le Monde, she blamed the previous and now-dissolved Icelandic government for "cronyism" and the "clannish running of institutions", and complained that a "handful of people in Reykjavik" were unable to control the "activities of a bank in the heart of the City [of London]". Joly’s ire extended to UK prime minister Gordon Brown (blamed for politicizing the crisis when freezing Icelandic assets using anti-terror laws), the Scandinavian nations (accused of wilfully "Iceland has next to no experience in dealing overlooking the "blackmailing of Iceland") and in particular the ineffectual European Commission with financial fraud, so we need an outside head José Manuel Barroso, memorably described by Joly as being "as so often, in over his negotiator who can help us do this" head". Joly suggests that if Reykjavik is forced by the UK and Dutch governments to settle all Icesave debts, currently running at just shy of €4 billion plus annual interest of 5.5%, it will reduce Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson, former finance and Iceland to "the rank of a poor country". foreign affairs minister "Already," Joly noted in August 2009, "Icelandic people... are starting to emigrate. Just a few thousand fishermen will be left, along with natural resources and a key geostrategic position at the mercy of the highest bidder. Russia, for example, might well find it attractive." The blonde crime-buster might sound like a strident anti-capitalist in the French-socialist sense but her point is well made. The Icesave debt alone, if adjusted to fit larger neighbouring economies, would translate into £700 billion in London, and $5.6 trillion in Washington. A quietly rising tide of opinion in Iceland now advocates the hiring of a single point man with global or at least regional credibility: someone able to knock a few heads together and unafraid of shredding local reputations. Names mentioned include Toomas Hendrik Ilves, the president of Estonia; former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer; and finally, a colourful character who would find this job compelling but way below his pay grade, former US president Bill Clinton. More likely is a former investment banker with global clout or a senior official at a leading stock regulator, such as the FSA or the SEC. "Iceland has next to no experience in dealing with financial fraud, so we need an outside negotiator who can help us do this," says Jón Baldvin Hannibalsson, a

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former Icelandic finance and foreign affairs minister. All in the family This move would have a further tacit benefit. Admonishing wayward individuals in such a tiny nation, where virtually everyone is closely interconnected personally or professionally is one thing; prosecuting and even jailing them is quite another. And while the likes of Hauksson and Andersen are unafraid of making enemies (as the FME chief notes: "It’s an honour to be criticized by criminals"), a willingness to shoot the very people who promoted you may not extend to high-court judges. "The judges will be overwhelmed, that is for sure," says one senior state official. "They won’t understand everything they are presented with, and they may be frightened by the process. We need to make sure this doesn’t happen." That kind of outcome isn’t as remote as it sounds. Just look at Sweden’s own banking crisis in the early 1990s. Stockholm approached the issue of how to solve the meltdown of its own banks logically and pragmatically, offering a model to UK and US regulators faced with their own crisis in late 2008. But Sweden was lenient toward market manipulators, indicting 500 individuals in 1992 and 1993 but prosecuting just five. Follow the money Many of those Swedish charges involved insider trading – always hard to prove in court – but many Bonds issued by Kaupthing, Glitnir and in Reykjavik fear the same will happen over the Landsbanki by currency between 2002 and coming years, as the wealthiest Icelanders, faced 2008 with fraud charges and the possibility of huge Value (in $mln No. of fines and even time in jail, come to court backed Currency equivalent) deals by phalanxes of highly paid lawyers. Australian dollar 501 4 Iceland’s citizens – many now deeply in debt after borrowing heavily in foreign currencies to fund their own lifestyles, only to suffer when the British pounds Icelandic króna collapsed in 2008 and 2009 – want to see justice. As 1,688 15 sterling Vilhjálmur Bjarnason, a professor of business at the University of Iceland and chair of the country’s Association of Small Investors, notes: "It is Canadian dollar 576 4 important for us to find out what happened and how it happened. And it is important to see some big heads roll. Many senior officials and senior Czech koruna 177 6 bankers in Iceland are suffering now – they are suffering as they are Euro 16,306 98 waiting [to be convicted], and yet you talk to them and still they are in denial. Most of them don’t believe they have done anything wrong." Hong Kong dollar 109 5 Iceland has been put through the mill over the past 18 months. Its Hungarian forint 34 1 population, so self-assured during the banking bubble of the 2000s, was as surprised as any when their economy unravelled overnight. Greece’s Icelandic króna 101 5 embattled leaders, among others, could learn much from how this tiny nation of 320,000 isolated in the frozen North Atlantic is seeking to put Japanese yen 1,133 16 itself back together again with the help of a new generation of regulators strung out across Iceland and Europe. Mexican peso 212 1 "If I could look back in four or five years’ time, I would like to see that the Norwegian krone 41 1 banks have been put back on their feet, that we’re keeping them on a tight leash, and that we have started to regain some credibility with foreign Singapore dollar 12 1 governments and institutions," says FME chief Andersen. But he adds that the road back from ruin will be long and hard. "It gives me no pleasure to Slovak koruna 15 1 have been right all along," he says. "The pain has been incredible. The Swiss franc 1,399 14 government sold the banks to people with no banking experience and questionable management experience. To be honest I think it will take US dollar 13,015 more than five years to get out of this financial hole, unless we strike oil. Our credibility has been completely shattered." Total 35,518 201 Subscribe today Source: Euromoney You can order Euromoney by contacting our subscription hotline: Call: +44 (0)20 7779 8999 (UK) or +1 212 224 3570

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