Noord-Holland province had no indications that investing money in Icelandic banks was risky, the province’s queen’s commissioner Harry Borghouts said on Thursday.

Borghouts was answering questions from a provincial inquiry into the investment. Noord-Holland put €78m into Iceland’s Landsbanki, money which it lost when Landsbanki went bankrupt.
Borghouts said putting the money into an Icelandic bank was not considered to be risky because the financial sector supervisors had not given any sign that things may be wrong. ‘You cannot just limit yourself to Dutch banks. In addition, we had a system of international supervision which we believed in,’ news agency ANP reported Borghouts as saying.
Holland’s local and provincial governments had at least €250m invested in Icelandic and US banks which were hit by the financial crisis.