Minister of Finance Steingrímur J. Sigfússon appeared on the BBC to explain where Iceland went wrong, financially, and where it is going next.
In the clip below from BBC’s Hard Talk, the minister was provided with a quote from political scientist Eiríkur Bergmann Einarsson which contends that Iceland’s downfall was due to a deeply-embedded political and business climate of corruption and nepotism, and asked if he felt this was the case.
Steingrímur responded that while this statement was true in many ways, that the nation as a whole went off track. While emphasising that individual people were not responsible for the mistakes and wrongdoings of politicians and businessmen, he said that even the media took part in the culture of overconsumption.
To amend this, he said that Iceland needs to follow the rule of law, and that those responsible for the crash need to be brought to justice; not because there is a desire to punish them per se, but that “that’s the way our constitution works.”
An excerpt from the interview can be seen here.
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