President puts the people before banks

Britain has threatened to block Iceland’s accession to the European Union after its President vetoed the repayment of a £3.6 billion loan, The Times reports. Last year as Britain and the Netherlands guaranteed the deposits of over 400,000 investors affected by the collapse of Icesave, an online subsidiary of the island nation’s second largest bank, its parliament passed a bill to schedule repayments. President Ólafur Grimsson, however, has “stunned the world’s financial community by refusing to sign the repayment schedule into law,” the London daily reports. He has declared “that the matter would be decided in a referendum among Iceland’s 243,000 voters” who will ultimately have to cough up the money over a 15 year period. Lord Myners, the UK financial services minister, has darkly warned that Icelanders risk “pariah status”. Iceland would “sacrifice any relationship… to the EU if it failed to repay the money,” he said.