Reykjavik // Iceland’s prime minister on Monday refused to resign despite calls to do so after leaked tax documents showed he and his wife used an offshore firm to allegedly hide million-dollar investments.
“I have not considered quitting because of this matter nor am I going to quit because of this matter,” prime minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson told Icelandic television Channel 2.
According to the leaked Panama Papers, Mr Gunnlaugsson and his wife Anna Sigurlaug Palsdottir purchased the offshore company Wintris in the British Virgin Islands in December 2007. The reports have prompted calls for a no-confidence vote in parliament against him.
He transferred his 50 per cent stake to her in 2009 for the symbolic sum of one dollar on December 31, 2009 – the day before a new Icelandic law took effect that would have required him to declare the ownership of Wintris as a conflict of interest.
He has insisted he never hid any money abroad, and says his wife, who inherited a fortune from her father, has paid all her taxes in Iceland.
“She has neither utilised tax havens nor can you say that her company is an offshore company in the sense that it pays taxes abroad rather than in Iceland,” Mr Gunnlaugsson said on his website.
Whether or not Mr Gunnlaugsson is guilty of tax evasion remains to be proven, but his opponents have insisted he step down regardless.
“The prime minister should immediately resign,” former Social Democratic prime minister Johanna Sigurdardottir said.
More than 24,000 Icelanders have also signed a petition demanding his resignation, while the opposition has said it will seek a vote of no confidence in parliament, likely to be held this week. Protests were scheduled in Reykjavik outside parliament.
Published reports about the prime minister’s financial matters have brought quick condemnation from prominent Icelandic politicians. Former prime minister Johanna Sigurdardottir called for Mr Gunnlaugsson’s resignation, as did Birgitta Jonsdottir, the popular head of the Pirate Party.
“Information on the involvement of current ministers in companies in tax havens was hidden from the Icelandic people before the last elections, and it is only right that they get to appraise the situation again,” Arni Pall Arnason, leader of the center-left Social Democratic Alliance, told the Morgunbladid newspaper.
Wintris lost money as a result of the 2008 financial crash that crippled Iceland, and is claiming a total of 515 million Icelandic kronur (Dh15.4m) from the three failed Icelandic banks: Landsbanki, Glitnir, and Kaupthing.
He has been accused of a serious conflict of interest as he was involved as prime minister in reaching a deal for the banks’ claimants.
Mr Gunnlaugsson, the head of the centre-right Progressive Party, began his four-year term in 2013, five years after Iceland’s financial collapse.
Iceland, a volcano-dotted North Atlantic nation with a population of just 330,000, went from economic superstar to financial basket case almost overnight when its main commercial banks collapsed within a week of one another in 2008.
* Agence France-Presse and Associated Press