Baugur chief indicted in Iceland The most prominent of Iceland's one-time corporate raiders has been indicted by the country's special prosecutor in the latest attempt by the Nordic island to uncover alleged wrongdoing from its dramatic financial crisis. Jón Ásgeir Jóhannesson, who once bought up swaths of the UK high street through his investment company Baugur, was charged in last week's indictment alongside the former chief executive of Glitnir, one of Iceland's biggest banks. The entrepreneur became the epitome of both Iceland's boom and also its painful bust after a group of oligarchs used cheap credit to build global empires that crumbled as Iceland's overleveraged banks collapsed. At one stage, Baugur owned UK retail chains such as Hamley's, House of Fraser and Oasis. It is part of a bigger tale. It is important to how this was actually, how our financial institutions were operating before the crisis," Olafur Hauksson, the special prosecutor behind the indictment, told the Financial Times. The case, which is due to go to court on January 7, relates to a loan from Glitnir, which had Mr Jóhannesson as a leading shareholder, to a holding company to buy a large stake in Aurum Holdings, a jewellery group. Mr Jóhannesson is accused of being an accomplice to a breach of fiduciary duty by exerting pressure on Glitnir to approve the loan. IKr1bn of the IKr6bn ($47.5m) loan was transferred into Mr Jóhannesson's bank account and most of it was used to pay off debt, the indictment alleges. Larus Welding, the former chief executive of Glitnir, and two former directors of the bankrupt bank are accused of breaching their fiduciary duty. Lawyers for Mr Jóhannesson and Mr Welding declined to comment ahead of the pleading, as is customary in Iceland. But Mr Jóhannesson denied wrongdoing in an email to an Icelandic newspaper. He pointed to the sale of Aurum, which owns jewellers Mappin & Webb and Goldsmiths, earlier this month to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for a rumoured sum of about £180m, in line with the Glitnir loan evaluation. But the Glitnir loan, coming just months before its collapse in 2008, has long been held up by critics of the so-called Viking Raiders of just how calamitous the credit-fuelled empire building was for Iceland. According to a 2010 UK court order that froze Mr Jóhannesson's assets worldwide and which is still in force, Glitnir's administrators alleged that the deal resulted in a loss of IKr6bn because the loan was never repaid and the bank could not recover the Aurum shares pledged as security. A civil case on the loan has been underway for the past two years in Iceland and Gestur Jonsson, Mr Jóhannesson's lawyer, said three experts were due to give their opinions in the case in the spring. Mr Hauksson, who has filed about 10 indictments related to bank collapses including against the former chief executive and chairman of Kaupthing and another 50-60 indictments arising from the crisis, said his team were completing investigations faster as they neared a deadline of the end of 2014 to stop work. We are picking up the pace. We have more experience and more knowledge now," he said.