Iceland’s richest man, Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson, allegedly hired police officers to carry out covert surveillance on a group of citizens who had filed a lawsuit against him, reports RÚV in an extensive story aired on news programme Kveikur. The operation reportedly cost tens of millions of krónur and involved three officers — some retired, others still on active duty at the time.
“I’m just really shocked by this,” said economist and former Independence Party MP Vilhjálmur Bjarnason, who was one of the individuals targeted. “I was truly shaken to discover that I was being followed — not just by hired individuals, but by the police as well.”
The surveillance is believed to have taken place in autumn 2012, when Vilhjálmur was transitioning from academia to politics. Despite this, the operation had nothing to do with his political involvement.
Instead, the surveillance is tied to a legal case in which Vilhjálmur and around 300 other former shareholders of Landsbankinn were seeking damages from the bank’s majority owner, Björgólfur Thor.
Personal data on a group of individuals was systematically collected; homes and workplaces were monitored, hidden cameras were used, the targets were shadowed, and detailed records of their daily lives were kept — including swimming trips, car washes, and the contents of their garages.
Up to three police officers were involved, using a number of rental cars and technical equipment. The operation is believed to have required close to a thousand work hours. The aftermath includes hundreds of photographs and over a hundred hours of video recordings that were obtained by Kveikur.
One of the police officers, allegedly involved in the operation, used his access to sensitive police databases to assist with the surveillance. He used his position to gather additional data on the targets, including private details that would otherwise have been unavailable to private investigators.
The lawsuit
The shareholders’ group filed a class-action lawsuit against Björgólfur Thor Björgólfsson in 2011, accusing him of misleading investors and withholding critical information that would have exposed the bank’s enormous loans to him and his family — loans that placed significant risk on the institution. According to the plaintiffs, had they known this, they would either have sold their shares or never purchased them in the first place, sparing themselves the losses they suffered when the bank failed.
After years of legal wrangling and repeated trips through Iceland’s court system with no resolution, a settlement was finally reached in mid-2023. Björgólfur agreed to compensate the shareholders if they dropped the case — without admitting any wrongdoing or accepting responsibility for the bank’s operations or collapse.
At the turn of the year, he paid the second instalment of the settlement, bringing the total payout to over one billion krónur. All the shareholders received their portion — all except one: Alvogen CEO Róbert Wessman.
Björgólfur had set a condition that Róbert be excluded from the deal. Although Róbert had not originally been a shareholder in the bank, he had purchased worthless shares from, among others, Icelandic pension funds, thereby securing a right to join the class-action suit and help fund the legal costs. Because of his exclusion, those who remained in the settlement received a slightly larger share.
According to RÚV, the reason for this condition can best be described as the result of a long-standing feud between the two tycoons — a rivalry that has spanned years. Once close allies at Actavis, Björgólfur Thor and Róbert became bitter rivals after parting ways in 2008 — a feud that later fuelled suspicions around a shareholder lawsuit against Björgólfur. Believing the case was orchestrated by Róbert through supposed puppets, Björgólfur allegedly financed covert surveillance in an attempt to expose those behind the lawsuit’s evidence.
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