prime minister

"He was a secretive figure. Although he wielded power, he did not like to be seen to wield it. He preferred to remain in the shadows, to operate from behind the scenes. He was famous for his network of connections. His friends included the current prime minister, previous prime ministers and those mysterious figures who were the real power brokers in the country. He was not indebted to them; they were indebted to him. No matter which faction or which party happened to be in power, Yoshiaki could always be certain of wielding influence."

"Luckily, a friend of mine, Henryk de Kwiatkowski, lived in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas. He had a lot of influence, so I called him, and he called the prime minister, and with ten minutes to go, we got permission for my father’s body to stay on the boat."

"Half an hour later the TVNZ team returned. Downey talked to them about contract law, about the nature of offer and acceptance. ‘This morning we made you an offer and you did not accept it so, to clear the air and make sure of exactly what we are saying now, that offer is gone because you did not accept it,’ he said. ‘We are starting again.’ In a brilliant deal for Sky, by the end of the negotiation TVNZ agreed to pay $5 million over three years—the same cost of Sky’s full package of rights from News Corp over the same period. ‘The beauty of the story for us,’ says Heatley, ‘is that for the first three years that Sky had wall-to-wall rugby, and while our subscriber numbers went through the roof, it cost us nothing. In exchange for a package of delayed rights and nothing live, we got TVNZ to pay us the same amount of money that we were paying Murdoch. I don’t want us to sound like smartarses, because I don’t mean it like that, but if TVNZ had been willing to pay that amount to News Corp, TVNZ could have won the exclusive rights for itself. But for various reasons the board of a government-owned company is a lot slower than the board of a private company. So instead of getting the rights itself, it had unknowingly just agreed to pay the full cost of us getting them.’ Ironically, just as Sky’s board had gone into the negotiation feeling under pressure from the government because Sky had the full package of rugby rights, TVNZ’s board had probably gone into the negotiation also feeling under pressure from the government because TVNZ did not have any rights. Board members may even have thought their jobs could have been on the line. After all, if the prime minister was angry that the live games were all going to be on Sky, how much angrier might he have been if TVNZ had emerged from the negotiations without even delayed coverage rights? For Sky, the deal was a triumph. ‘We felt very happy. It was fun,’ Downey says."

"It is a fact that the governor of the Central Bank and the prime minister had a phone call to discuss the loan to Kaupthing, but what the two men said has never been revealed, even though the call was recorded and the parliament itself asked for the information. The prime minister, who didn’t know at the time that the conversation was being recorded, has vetoed all requests to make it public."

"I should have walked away once I had figured out what was going on. I should have said: ‘I smell a rat and this is dangerous.’ That was what my intuition was telling me, but I ignored it because I thought I would be portrayed as a failure or a bad loser if I claimed that the deal was rigged. Instead, I wrote letters to the prime minister, the economics minister and the privatisation committee and did media interviews in which I said that the privatisation process for both banks was opaque and unclear. I told them that even Bulgaria’s privatisation rules were more transparent than Iceland’s. But my comments were ignored. Later, there was a parliamentary inquiry, which basically brushed over everything. After the crash, it became clear that what I had been saying had been justified."