Along with more financially capable individuals, thousands of ordinary people, pensioners, dayworkers and students bought company stock in a frenzy of financial faith. In many ways it was a very different Iceland, one in which no active stock exchange had yet been established. Ten years on, the concern-raising database is still to be established. As a law was passed to allow the creation of a supposedly unique database of medical history and genetic data, the company promised to transform the Icelandic population’s supposed genetic homogeneity into hard cash. Kári Stefánsson, who utilised his high-school friendships, not least his bonds with then prime-minister Davíð Oddsson, not so much to get direct state-support for his company as to create a convincing aura of such support. The company was – and remains – one man’s alter-ego, Dr. Perhaps Iceland’s most glamorous pre-lapsic failure was the rise and decline of deCode genetics. The above was written by Valdimar Jóhannesson in the conservative daily Morgunblaðið, in 1999. The nation must guard against the predator’s claw, it must cease to sleep on the watch, it must show will and stop accommodating liars and cheaters.” Icelandic voters deserve to have full disclosure of such bribery, granted the rumor has basis in reality, so that the nation may rise from its slumber and realize what sort of government holds the reins of power in Iceland. At the passing of the bill into law, the stocks of deCODE rose to thirty times their original price making the company worth a total of 40 billion krónur. It is alleged that the Independence Party accepted 20 million IS krónur and the Centrist Party 17.5 million to grease the company’s momentum and especially to help the bill on the centralized health database clear the Althingi. “Hereby we formally request an answer from the Independence Party and the Centrist Party regarding the truth of the claim that these parties have accepted a large sum of money, a contribution worth as much as half a million US dollars, from deCODE Genetics, the parent company of Íslensk erfðagreining, or from related parties.
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