Thursday 4 March 2010

It's not often we care about how they vote in Iceland

Iceland holds a referendum tomorrow on whether to repay savings lost when the Icelandic banks collapsed in 2008.

Cornwall Council tells me this vote is about "retail" investors and not the UK local authorities whose cash is also missing. But somewhere in Iceland is about £9m which properly belongs to Cornwall. It had been invested in the Landsbanki bank.

A highly critical Audit Commission report, published in March 2009, claimed some of the investments had been "negligently deposited" by the former Restormel borough council just 90 minutes before Landsbanki collapsed. Landsbanki's collapse took with it £5m from the former Cornwall county council and £4m from Restormel.

Lawyers for the new Cornwall Council are studying their options. But polls indicate that 74% of Icelanders plan to vote against repayment.

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