Icelandic banksters sent to jail.

An excerpt written by James Corbett in Saturday's International Forecaster:

Earlier this month Iceland's Supreme Court handed down a four-and-a-half year sentence to Jon Thorsteinn Jonsson and Ragnar Zophonias Gudjonsson, two former executives at Iceland's Byr Savings Bank. In 2008, just before the bottom fell out of the Icelandic banking system, the pair used their positions to approve an 800 million kronur loan from Byr to Exeter Holdings ehf. That loan was used to buy out Jonsson and Gudjonsson's shares in Byr, which were then put up for sale as collateral to guarantee the loan itself. Now the pair are preparing to spend the next half a decade behind bars.

And the Icelanders didn't stop there. Earlier this week Olafur Thor Hauksson, the special prosecutor investigating the misdeeds of the Icelandic banking crisis, confirmed more arrests and raids. One of those scooped up was Jon Thorsteinn Oddleifsson, the former treasury boss of Landsbanki. Three others from Landsbanki were arrested, and raids and searches were conducted at MP Bank, Straumur (now ALMC), and even the central bank itself. All of these banks are under investigation and more arrests are expected.

Haven't heard about Hauksson, or the Jonsson and Gudjonsson convictions, or the prosecutor's office's raid of the Icelandic central bank? Now why would that be, I wonder? It's almost as if the media would prefer the public didn't hear about the round-up, prosecution and conviction of once-powerful bankers, lest they get any ideas for their own political context. Imagine that.

Still, all hope is not lost for the beginning of the Great Banker Round-up of 2012. It seems a significant-but-underreported financial corruption case has just broken through to the mainstream. Is it MSNBC breaking the story? Bloomberg? The New York Times? Hardly. One of the “respectable” institutions across the pond, then? The Financial Times? The Economist? Nope. It's Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone.