I now have that audacious publication in my hot little hands: the one with the salaries of all my fellow citizens in it. Yes, dear readers, YT is not above a little salacious snooping. And before I go further, let it be known Ithat I stand corrected: it reveals the wages not of 1,000 Icelanders but 2,400.
Hmhmhm, quick perusal… yes, predictably it’s the CEO’s of large corporations that take home the greatest dosh. Lessee… whoa! Topping the list and way ahead of the competition is one Vilhelm Róbert Wessman, CEO of pharmaceutical company Actavis Group [suddenly every other Icelandic company is something-or-other ‘Group’, very amusing] with a whopping ISK 20,396,000 a month [that’s twenty million, three-hundred-ninety-six thousand, in case the figures boggle] which works out to about USD 309,000/GBP 182,000 a month. Probably not staggering figures in some parts of the world, but definitely, ahem, unique on this little rock.
Surprisingly, one Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson, CEO of Baugur Group, makes a piddly ISK 9,102,000 a month, about half that of Wessman, and this despite presiding over a company that owns half of Iceland and is working on buying up the UK high street and in fact employs some 43,000 people in the UK alone. [Update: as I wrote this, news broke that Baugur has bought yet another Danish department store chain. Those boys gobble up store chains at the rate of one-a-week, f’rcryingoutloud.] Methinks, however, that a good part of his earnings must have remained behind in the UK; however this is purely YT speculation and should not be confused with factual evidence.
Compare that with the salary of our President Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson [caution: under no circumstances confuse with Prime Minister] which is mere lunch money at ISK 1.4 million a month.
So there you have it. Those are the highlights; once you have those the details cease to be very interesting. Unless you know someone on the list, that is. Unless it happens to be your neighbour, for instance.
AND THE WEATHER IS…
Mild and quite excellent in the latter part of today. The sun came out in the early afternoon and hung around until nightfall, which incidentally was at 23.47, whereas daybreak was at 03.05. Current temps are 12°C but highs were around 18°C today.