From South Ribble Borough Council
ALMOST all of the £5m deposited in two failed Icelandic banks by South Ribble Borough Council has now been recovered.
A final payment made to the council this week means that it has now got back all of its £3 million long-term deposit with Landsbanki, having already received 94% of its £2 million short-term deposit with Heritable. It takes the total recovered to more than £4.9 million.
The deposits became frozen during the meltdown of Iceland’s economy brought about by the failure of all three of its major banks in October 2008. Relative to the size of the country’s economy, Iceland’s banking collapse was the largest suffered by any country in economic history. More than 120 local authorities in the UK were affected.
Conservative Councillor Stephen Robinson, South Ribble Borough Council’s cabinet member with responsibility for finance and resources, said:
“We have worked very hard to pursue the return of our frozen Icelandic deposits since the country’s economic collapse, and I’m absolutely delighted that we’ve now recovered almost all of the money. This is a very different scenario to the one painted by the doom merchants in 2008 and early 2009, when they were suggesting that all the money we had in Iceland was lost forever.
“The important thing to understand, however, is that this is not a windfall. On the advice on the Local Government Association, the deposits have remained on our balance sheet since 2008, and we had full confidence that our money would be returned. ”