Media organisation Associated Whistle-Blowing Press have released the first batch of documents from Glitnir bank, indicating that the bank paid part of CEO Bjarni Ármannsson’s private expenses.
AWP was founded by two former journalists of WikiLeaks Central, a news portal for WikiLeaks, and its aims are to release files and documents they believe the public has a right to see.
But in a 2012 Grapevine interview, the founders stated that they wanted to play a greater role in the analysis of documents and denouncing wrongdoings.
Sunday’s release of the Glitnir documents on Ljost.is is the organization’s first revelation.
The batch contains e.g. invoices and e-mails since before the crash in 2008, indicating that the bank paid for various expenses of its CEO, Bjarni Ármannsson.
Amongst them is a year’s rent of a flat in Oslo in 2007. E-mails indicate that the owner had given up trying to collect the rent straight from Bjarni and turned to a staff member of the bank by the end of the year.
In the beginning of 2008, the bank made payments for the CEO’s long overdue rent.
AWP also released a list of the bank’s shareholders and stockholders in 2007 and 2008 and claim that Glitnir owned 30.41% in itself, while the legal limit was 10%. This is however unclear in the documents and not backed up with copies of certified documents.
Also, it is hardly news as Icelandic media have already uncovered this, but the actual documents have probably not been made public before.
Overall, there’s not much newsworthy in AWP’s first release but the organization claim this is only the first batch of a series of Glitnir files.
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