“This means that we have a debt.” “The deposit is being collected, and it was registered without comment at the time, and we therefore had no reason to doubt that it was approved,” says Hjalti Eythór Árnason, director of the legal department at Byggðastofnun, in an interview with Morgunblaðið.
He was asked if it amounts to almost ISK 180 million. The Swedish Development Agency’s lawsuit against the non-profit organization Aurora Observatory could be nullified by the fact that the Aurora Observatory’s lease agreement with the Chinese company Polar Research Institute of China, which leases the Kárhól land in Þingeyjarsveit together with real estate, provides for a mortgage. The use of the land and the real estate on it is not permitted without the consent of the Chinese tenant. The Byggðastofnur loan was granted in 2020, but the said lease agreement was concluded in 2018 and registered on June 15 of the same year.
No normal determination
Hjalti mentions that the lease was not registered as a burden on the land and therefore the surety was registered without comment. He says that when registering a document, it is checked what can prevent registration without comments, but there was no such thing when registering the bond with a mortgage on land and real estate.
According to Hjalti, a clause regarding the consent of the lessee of the property prior to the mortgage is not a normal clause in such an agreement and is not necessarily an obligation that prevents the mortgage of the property. He says no reference was made to the clause in the lease regarding the mortgage.
Read more about the case in today’s Morgunblaði.
