Reykjavík Grapevine - 19.05.2006, Page 6

this summer.
According to The Coalition
Against Trafficking Women, an
estimated 40,000 women will be
“imported” from Mid- and Eastern
Europe to Germany, where prosti-
tution is legal, to accommodate the
booming business created by the
inf lux of 3,000,000 football fans,
mostly males, who are projected to
attend the football World Cup.
In Berlin, brothels are being
constructed, and reports of drive-in
sex huts have appeared.
According to the issued state-
ment from the Association of
Icelandic Women’s Movements, this
equates sports and sex, objectifies
women as sex toys for men, and
increases human trafficking.
Geir Magnússon, the manager
of The Icelandic Football Associa-
tion told the Grapevine that the
board would convene to address the
challenge.
Finance Minister Accused of Decep-
tion
Former Minister of Social Affairs,
Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, strongly
criticised the current Minister of
Finance, Árni Mathiesen, for what
she called “lying to the parliament
and the nation.”
In a parliamentary session early
in May, Sigurðardóttir accused
Mathiesen of “denying reality” as
he still stands by his claims that
his party has lowered the average
person’s tax burden. She pointed
to figures, supported by all the
country’s leading authorities on
economics, that indicate that people
in the mid to low income bracket
are effectively paying two to three
times more of their total wages to
taxes than they were in 1995.
When asked to elaborate,
Sigurðardóttir told the Grapevine:
“This is my second parliamen-
tary query regarding this matter,
and once again the minister has
confirmed that he deceived us
about taxation under his govern-
ment. All leading economists and
commentators agree that the figures
clearly show that people with low or
average incomes have a significantly
heavier tax burden today than they
did before the current government
came to power. Árni Mathiesen,
Geir Haarde and Friðrik Sophus-
son have probably increased taxes
on this significant group of people
more than any other Finance Min-
isters in the history of Iceland.”
Tax Returns to Be Presented in
Seven Different Languages
Next Year
The Icelandic Internal Revenue
Service has announced plans to
provide non-Icelandic speakers with
tax returns in their native languag-
es, starting next year. The languag-
es in question are: English, Russian,
Spanish, Chinese, German, French
and Polish.
So far the scheme is limited
to those who pay income tax and
possess no assets other than savings,
and everyone else will still have
to file a standard tax return form.
However, most of those have now
been made available in English.
Apologies for Straying From the
Asphalt Path
Magnús Oddsson, Chairman of
the Icelandic Tourist Board, has
apologised for an advertisement
in which a heavily modified jeep
was seen driving through rough
Icelandic terrain. Oddsson told
Morgunblaðið in the beginning of
May that the accompanying text:
“Where monster trucks create the
roads” was entirely inappropriate
and deeply regrettable.
The reason for the controversy
is the fact that off-road driving
is technically illegal in Iceland.
Despite having large swathes of un-
inhabited countryside with no road
system and far outside the beaten
path, and despite the fact that ag-
gressive subsidized agriculture is
largely to blame for the sorry state
of the country’s ecology, off-road
driving has been fingered by politi-
cians as a main culprit in erosion
and was consequently outlawed here
many years ago.
Oddsson told Morgunblaðið:
“This came as a strong shock to
me, as I have spent years fighting
against the publication of depictions
of off-road driving in Iceland.”
He added that the ad agency
responsible had been contacted and
ordered not to let the advertisement
be republished in any form in the
future.
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