Iceland has rejected resuming EU accession talks by 52.5 percent to 47.5, a result its fishing industry fought hard for and, according to a Follow the Money investigation, helped shape from behind the scenes.
Icelanders have voted to stay out of the European Union, rejecting a government push to reopen membership talks and siding with those who argued the country’s fishing waters were too important to risk. With all but one constituency reporting, national broadcaster RUV put the No side on 52.5 percent to 47.5 for Yes and declared it was almost impossible for the remaining count to change the outcome. Iceland has clearly voted to reject the resumption of accession talks, RUV said. The result is non-binding, but the government has committed to respecting it.
A Campaign Fought and Won on Fish
Fisheries were not one issue among several in this campaign. They were, by most accounts, the issue. Iceland exported fish to the EU worth roughly €1.4 billion last year, and the industry warned throughout the campaign that Brussels’ Common Fisheries Policy would open the door to foreign takeovers of Icelandic fishing firms and let large fleets from Spain and the Netherlands into waters the country has controlled since it won the Cod Wars. “Fisheries are the oil of Iceland,” economist Thorólfur Geir Matthíasson of the University of Iceland told Follow the Money
How The Industry Shaped the Narrative
That investigation, published by Follow the Money’s The North Sea Investigations team, reported that Iceland’s fishing sector does not just hold economic weight, it holds a grip on the country’s media landscape too. Twenty five companies control roughly three quarters of Iceland’s fishing licences, and Follow the Money found that a handful of the biggest, including international fishing giant Samherji, took over publishing house Arvakur in 2009, whose flagship title Morgunblaðið remains Iceland’s only daily print newspaper and reaches, according to the investigation, 89 percent of Icelanders aged 12 to 80 every week. The day the referendum was formally announced, the investigation found, those same investors injected a further €4 million into the loss-making title to keep it running through the campaign.
Follow the Money reported that Morgunblaðið was accused during the campaign of running misinformation claiming Iceland would not secure the fishing exceptions its own politicians had promised to pursue in any future talks, and that the paper’s editorial line was openly hostile to membership throughout. According to the investigation, Arvakur’s own chief executive admitted investors wanted to influence the debate over the fishing quota system and EU membership when they took control of the title.
Borrowing The Brexit Playbook
The investigation drew a direct line between this campaign and the fishing arguments that shaped Brexit, reporting that conservative Icelandic commentator Hjörtur Guðmundsson had written fisheries reports for Vote Leave-linked think tank the Red Cell, and that former Vote Leave director Lee Rotherham had pointed to Iceland’s stance against the Common Fisheries Policy as a model for the UK. Follow the Money also traced Icelandic fishing company donations running into tens of thousands of euros to European conservative and Eurosceptic groups during the Brexit years, including payments structured, the investigation found, to stay under individual donation limits.
Money Without Oversight
Unlike donations to political parties, Iceland places no limit on what referendum campaigns can raise from private donors and imposes no requirement to disclose where the money comes from, a gap Follow the Money reported the country’s own National Audit Office admitted it had no way to monitor. That opacity, the investigation argued, let fishing money shape the campaign without ever showing up on a public ledger.
What This Means for Ireland
The result closes a door this paper flagged only yesterday. With Brussels floating a possible Common Fisheries Policy carve-out to bring Iceland into the fold, the IFPO had seized on the talks to press its own case that Ireland deserved the same opt-out. That precedent now has nothing to attach to. There is no accession process left for Brussels to offer flexibility on, and no obvious vehicle for Dublin to point to the next time Irish producers argue the CFP has failed a small, fisheries-dependent member state just as it was, by its own industry’s telling, failing Iceland from the outside.
Source: Follow the Money – The North Sea Investigations – reporting by Regin Winther Poulsen and Remy Käller.
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“Stop EU from Selling Our Fishing Resources to Iceland” – IFPO & IFPEA
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We cannot let EU off the hook – “No Icelandic Deal without Reciprocity.”
