Black Skies

44

Kolfinna, Lína’s friend who had given Sigurdur Óli the guest lists for the company’s glacier tours, recognised him immediately when he went back to see her. She was dashing about in preparation for some meeting and he had to follow her down the corridors before he could persuade her to slow down enough to hand her back the lists of names.

‘Could you run through who these people are for me?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry but I’m in a terrible hurry.’

‘Is there any more you can tell me about Lína?’

‘Are these people connected to her in some way?’ asked Kolfinna, running an eye down the list. ‘Christ, I’ve missed the meeting!’ she exclaimed, looking at her watch.

‘I don’t know,’ Sigurdur Óli said. ‘But I know this man,’ he added, pointing at Patrekur’s name. ‘This one too,’ indicating Hermann. ‘And I know who these four are.’ He pointed to the four bankers. ‘And of course I know Lína and Ebeneser, but there are lots of others left. Three foreigners, for example. They are foreigners, aren’t they? These ones here.’

‘It looks like it from the names. Are you wondering whether they might be resident in Iceland?’

‘Can you fill in any of the gaps?’

‘These two, Snorri and Einar, work here with us. I think this guy, Gudmundur, is a VIP client of theirs, and this one here, Ísak, is a big client too. I don’t know the foreigners. Maybe you should talk to Snorri; he might know more.’

‘Snorri?’

‘He deals with our parent company overseas. Maybe he knows who these foreigners are. Sorry, got to dash. Nice to see you again.’

Snorri was no less pressed than Kolfinna and Sigurdur Óli had to resign himself to waiting outside his office for twenty minutes before the door finally opened and he was ushered in. During their conversation the phone rang incessantly and Snorri answered some of the calls while ignoring the rest.

Sigurdur Óli explained the situation and the reason he needed information about the foreigners who had been on the corporate excursion. He did not mention the attack on Lína or Thorfinnur’s death, only that the police were investigating links between individuals in the corporate world. Snorri, a lean, agile man who obviously spent a good deal of time at the gym, answered quickly and concisely. He studied the list.

‘These two came to Iceland as our guests,’ he said, pointing to two of the foreign names. ‘We’re only a subsidiary of an international accountancy firm, as our name suggests. These men look after relations between us and their other subsidiaries in Scandinavia. They visit Iceland regularly, so we decided to send them on this tour. I gather they had a great time too.’

‘What about this one?’ asked Sigurdur Óli, pointing to the third foreign name.

‘No, I don’t know about him,’ said Snorri. ‘I think he must have been with the bankers.’

‘Do you know them at all?’

‘No. But we were doing a lot of business with the bank at the time, so I assume that’s how they came to be invited. Shall we check out this guy?’

‘If you wouldn’t mind.’

‘No problem.’

Snorri opened a search engine on his computer and typed in the man’s name. A number of results appeared and he clicked on the top one, then closed it and tried the next. In under a minute he had the facts.

‘He’s some executive at a bank in Luxembourg, not right at the top but in a good position. A middle manager, you might say. Alain Sörensen. Swedish on his father’s side, French on his mother’s, brought up in Sweden. Born 1969. Specialises in derivatives. Wife, two kids. Educated in France. Hobbies: cycling and travelling. Is that him?’ Snorri asked, looking up from the screen.

‘It’s the right name,’ Sigurdur Óli said.

‘He has nothing to do with our company; I think I can say that with confidence.’

‘Isn’t it likely then that he was with the bankers?’

‘Very likely. They’re the only people in the group who would have dealings with foreign banks.’

Sigurdur Óli thought back to the three men who had studied the list and claimed not to know anyone on it.

‘What’s it all about?’ asked Snorri. ‘Surely a bankers’ get-together isn’t a police matter?’

‘You wouldn’t have thought so,’ said Sigurdur Óli. ‘What do you make of it? What’s going on with all these banks and new billionaires?’

‘It’s not complicated,’ said Snorri.

‘Are they all financial rocket scientists?’

‘If only. The problem is that very few of the people involved in this new big-bucks business have much expertise in finance, and quite frankly some of them aren’t all that bright.’

‘Personally I’ve been quite impressed by what they’ve achieved,’ said Sigurdur Óli.

‘Yeah, sure, they’re buying up big-name companies in Denmark and the UK and putting Iceland on the map, as they say. Some of them are cleverer than others. And the boost to the banking sector has created a huge amount of work, not least for people in my line of business, as well as bringing plenty of revenue into the country. But they’re no wizards. They’ve simply discovered that there’s a vast supply of cheap credit in the world, short-term borrowing, just there for the taking. They have complex ownership arrangements and scoop up all the credit they can lay their hands on before lending it back to themselves, their companies and each other in order to buy companies, banks and airlines, paying enormous sums for them.’

‘So what’s wrong with that?’ asked Sigurdur Óli.

‘On the surface it looks as if they’re making money and accumulating businesses,’ explained Snorri, ‘but all that’s happening is that the shares in their companies are rising, so it looks as if they’re making a profit and that their loans are increasing simultaneously in value. There are indications that they’re pushing the share prices way beyond their economic value. Then when the public and so-called professional investors like pension funds see the share price going through the roof, they jump on the bandwagon, and the New Vikings take out even bigger loans against the rise, which is driven by a vastly inflated asset valuation. And so on.’

‘Is there no regulation?’

‘The valuation of assets is governed entirely by them. Look how they’re permitted to record goodwill, which is just some kind of expectation of future revenue. They decide how it’s calculated themselves. It’s a completely fictional number that can be blown up to tens of billions without having any basis in reality, but it helps them ramp up their market price still further. There’s next to no regulation of this sort of trick.’

‘Goodwill?’ echoed Sigurdur Óli.

‘They do whatever they can to make the numbers look good,’ said Snorri. ‘When the economy’s being run on this sort of model, it only needs one thing to go wrong for it to have catastrophic results. Hardly a single credit repayment can be made without the whole system coming crashing down. You may not have heard much about goodwill yet, but just you wait until you start hearing talk of credit lines.’

‘But isn’t it up to auditors like you to make sure that everything’s above board?’

‘That’s my point. We’re gradually easing ourselves out of a relationship with these individuals,’ said Snorri. ‘I’ve been fighting for this in our company and people are starting to listen to me. We’re not going to connive in these practices any more.’

‘What about Alain Sörensen?’

‘I don’t know him,’ said Snorri. ‘There are all sorts of banking scams that involve shifting money into tax havens and so on. But I don’t know this man.’

‘Tax havens?’

‘I only say that because he’s based in Luxembourg. A lot of that stuff passes through Luxembourg.’