Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson: Iceland's Viking raider forced into retreat

Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson built up a huge trading empire that owned vast swathes of the British high street. With the bursting of the credit bubble, his investment vehicle, Baugur, is in tatters.

When Iceland's banks collapsed last autumn, a defining image of the end of the boom was Jn sgeir Jhannesson's black jet taxiing out of its hangar. But the "poster boy" of Iceland's audacious raids abroad couldn't escape the mess, says The Sunday Times. Last week he was brought to earth when his main creditor, the now-nationalised Landsbanki, pushed the UK unit of his investment vehicle Baugur into administration. A giant question mark now hangs over great swathes of the British high street.

How Iceland population: 300,000; main industry: cod became a significant player in global retail and finance has never been clear, says The Times. "Doubters pointed darkly at the easy airlinks with Moscow." Whatever the truth, Jhannesson was brilliantly placed to benefit from the credit bubble blown by the island's three main banks: Landsbanki, Glitnir and Kaupthing. An entrepreneur to his fingertips (he is said to have started his first business at 13), his rock-star looks and air of derring-do epitomised everything that was vigorously Viking. "Nobody was really taken seriously outside Iceland until Jn sgeir," one Icelandic businessman told The Guardian.

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