Davíð Oddsson
Davíð Oddsson was prime minister of Iceland from 1991 to 2004, thirteen years, the longest in the country's history, and then foreign minister, governor of the central bank and the editor of the largest newspaper. He was the Independence Party leader who took a country of fish quotas and state banks and made it, by privatisation, tax cuts and the European Economic Area agreement of 1994 that gave it the single market without the Union, the laboratory of the Nordic right. The two state banks were sold in 2002-03 to businessmen close to the parties. The corporation tax was cut from fifty per cent to eighteen, and the fishing quotas were made tradeable property. There were the aluminium smelters and the dams for them, and the growth that by his retirement had made Icelanders the richest people in the world on paper. The banks he had sold grew to ten times the economy in the four years after he left and collapsed in October 2008 in the largest banking failure relative to a country's size in history, on his watch as governor of the central bank, from which the parliament removed him in February 2009 by a law written for the purpose. The special commission of 2010 found him among those who had shown negligence. He was born in Reykjavík in 1948, studied law, and wrote comedy for the radio and the theatre with two friends as a young man. He was mayor of Reykjavík from 1982 to 1991, when he built the Perlan dome on the hot-water tanks and the city hall on the pond. He took the party in 1991 from Thorsteinn Pálsson in a contest that split it. He became prime minister the same year. The thirteen years were also the Iraq war, which he and his foreign minister put Iceland on the coalition's list for without asking the parliament. There was the media law of 2004 aimed at the Baugur group's newspapers that the president refused to sign, the first veto in the republic's history, and the quarrel with the president Grímsson that has never ended. He handed over to Ásgrímsson in September 2004 by agreement. He was foreign minister for a year. He went to the bank in 2005. He has edited Morgunblaðið since 2009, and ran for president in 2016 and came fourth with fourteen per cent. He has said that the crash was the bankers' and the European Union's and not his, which the commission's report and the country's memory have not accepted.
- Lived: 1948 CE – ?
- Nationality: Icelandic
- Roles: prime minister, politician
