Geir Haarde
Geir Haarde was prime minister of Iceland from June 2006 to February 2009, the economist who inherited Oddsson's coalition and Oddsson's banks and was in office when both went. He was the only head of government in the world tried for the financial crisis of 2008. The crash was the first week of October. Glitnir was taken over on 29 September, and the emergency law of 6 October came. He ended a television address with God bless Iceland and the country understood. Landsbanki and Kaupthing were seized in the two days after. The British government used its anti-terrorism act to freeze Landsbanki's assets on 8 October, which Icelanders have not forgiven. The krona lost half its value. There was the IMF loan of November, the first to a Western country since Britain in 1976, and the pots-and-pans revolution, the crowds banging kitchenware outside the Althing every Saturday from October to January until the coalition broke on 26 January 2009 and he resigned. He had announced three days earlier that he had cancer of the oesophagus and would not stand again. The Althing voted in September 2010, by thirty-three to thirty, to impeach him alone of the four ministers the investigating commission had named, before the Landsdómur, the court of impeachment, which had never sat in its hundred and five years. It acquitted him in April 2012 on three counts and convicted him on the fourth, of failing to hold cabinet meetings on the danger, with no penalty. It was a verdict he called absurd and the European Court of Human Rights upheld in 2017. He was born in Reykjavík to a Norwegian father, studied at Brandeis, Johns Hopkins and Minnesota. He was an economist at the central bank, and sat in the Althing from 1987. He was finance minister from 1998 to 2005 and foreign minister for a year before the premiership, Oddsson's understudy for a decade. He was ambassador to Washington from 2015 to 2019, and to the OECD until 2022. The country had decided that a man convicted of not holding meetings could represent it.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Icelandic
- Roles: prime minister, economist, diplomat
