Glitnir obtains further freezing orders against Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson

The Winding-up Board of Glitnir has today obtained further worldwide Freezing Orders in connection with Glitnir’s claim against Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson. The Freezing Orders are in respect of transfers of sums totalling £585,648 made out of Jóhannesson’s bank account after the worldwide Freezing Order obtained against him on 11 May.

The new Orders have been made against Bohemian Partners LLP, Tina Maree Kilmister, Aspiring Capital Partners LLP and Jeffrey Ross Blue, and attach only to the money received from Jóhannesson. There are no other claims made against the four new respondents, the rest of their assets are not frozen and there are no allegations of wrongdoing against them.  Á íslensku

Notes to editors:
In May 2010, Glitnir secured a freezing order from the High Court in London against Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson’s worldwide assets, including two apartments in Manhattan’s exclusive Gramercy Park neighbourhood, for which he paid approximately $25 million.

Simultaneously, Glitnir announced that it had commenced a $2bn legal action in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson, formerly its principal shareholder, Lárus Welding, previously Glitnir’s Chief Executive, Thorsteinn Jonsson, its former Chairman, and other former directors, shareholders and third parties associated with Jóhannesson, for fraudulently and unlawfully draining more than $2 billion out of the Bank.

Glitnir hf. is also taking action against its former auditors PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), for facilitating and helping to conceal the fraudulent transactions engineered by Jóhannesson and his associates, which ultimately led to the Bank’s collapse in October 2008.

The lawsuit, filed in New York on May 11, shows:

• How a cabal of businessmen led by Jóhannesson conspired to systematically loot Glitnir in order to prop up their own failing companies
• How Jóhannesson and his co-conspirators seized control of Glitnir, removing or sidelining experienced Bank employees – and abused this control to place the Bank in extreme financial peril
• How Jóhannesson, Welding and the other Defendants facilitated and concealed their diversions from the Bank by overriding Glitner’s financial risk controls, violating Iceland’s banking laws, and orchestrating a blizzard of convoluted stock “parking” transactions
• How the individual Defendants, with the complicity of Glitnir’s auditor PwC, raised $1bn from investors in New York without revealing the truth about the Bank’s financial exposures to Jóhannesson and his co-conspirators
• How the Defendants’ transactions cost Glitnir more than $2bn and contributed significantly to the Bank’s collapse

A full copy of the New York court action is available at www.glitnirbank.com.

Glitnir, a public company, was until its collapse a full-service bank, providing corporate banking, investment banking, capital markets, investment management and retail banking services. It had offices in ten countries, including Manhattan, and its market capitalisation once stood at more than €4bn.

Hit by the global financial crisis in 2007-08, and financially weakened by the fraudulent transactions of the Defendants in the current ligitation, Glitnir declared bankruptcy in October 2008. It is now the subject of a court-supervised moratorium proceeding in Iceland, under the supervision of Iceland’s Financial Supervisory Authority and a Resolution Committee. An Icelandic court has appointed a Winding-Up Board, headed by Steinunn Guðbjartsdóttir, to supervise the liquidation of the Bank’s assets. The Winding-Up Board and Resolution Committee have authorised this litigation.