Word: dutchness
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...Europe, Santander has come out ahead with its 2007 purchase of a chunk of ABN Amro. Santander joined forces with the Royal Bank of Scotland and Belgium's Fortis to buy the ailing Dutch giant for $103.7 billion. But while both RBS and Fortis are now on the casualty list themselves, Santander's $17 billion stake in the Brazilian wing of ABN Amro is worth about $49 billion after merging with Santander's existing business in Brazil. In 2007, the firm spent just under $10 billion for Italy's Banca Antonveneta, which it promptly sold off for a $3.74 billion...
...This isn't the first time that Vietnam has detained staff from a foreign company after losing money. In 2006, the Vietnamese government arrested four employees of ABN AMRO, a Dutch bank, for fraud after the government lost money on a foreign currency contract. To end the dispute, ABN AMRO paid $4.5 million to a Vietnamese state-owned bank, apparently to secure the release of the four Vietnamese employees who faced the death penalty. Many investors hoped this was a small bump on the path to further economic reforms, and it didn't slow Vietnam's entry into the World...
...former British official appeared just an hour after an inquiry in the Netherlands criticized Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende for backing the Iraq invasion on the basis of dubious legal reasoning. The commission set up by the Dutch government to probe the run-up to the war found that Balkenende's then caretaker administration blithely accepted foreign assurances about Iraq's WMDs, even though Dutch intelligence agencies were "more reserved" in their assessments. (See pictures of Tony Blair's decade in power...
...Although Grimsson insists that Iceland will repay the debt - which amounts to about one-third of Iceland's annual output, or $17,400 per Icelander - he says the British and Dutch governments are trying to bully the country into accepting an extortionate interest rate of 5.55% over 15 years. He called for a referendum, set for Feb. 20, on whether the country should accept the repayment plan...
...Other analysts say that Iceland's future may not be as imperiled as the British and Dutch suggest. "When you have a debtor who cannot repay immediately, what do you do? Do you beat Iceland to pieces? If you do, the chances of getting the money back goes down the drain," says Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels and a board member of the Central Bank of Iceland. "The U.K. and Netherlands may feel that it would be easier to be repaid if Iceland is in the E.U." (Read "Iceland's Urgent...