Samherji owner and CEO Thorsteinn Mar Baldvinsson has resigned from the board of the shipping company Framherji in the Faroe Islands, a company official confirmed.
Thorsteinn was also chairman of the company.
Samherji owns a quarter of the Framherji, which is one of the largest shipping companies in the Faroe Islands.
Last week Baldvinsson temporarily stepped aside at Samherji to allow investigations into the company’s alleged wrongdoings in Namibia.
Samherji has been distancing itself from its former managing director in Namibia, Johannes Stefansson, after he made serious bribery allegations against the company.
Last week WikiLeaks published more than over 30,000 documents (the first of two batches) it said it obtained from a whistleblower within Samherji.
Stefansson, now a whistleblower working with Nambian anti-corruption authorities, implemented bribe payments on the authorization of Mar Baldvinsson, and biggest shareholder, according to allegations reported by the website of Icelandic bi-weekly newspaper Stundin.
The cash-for-quotas scandal continues to provide new twists, having led to the resignations of two Namibian cabinet ministers, as well as the managing director of South Africa-based investment firm Investec Asset Management.
Events have also swept up Norwegian state bank DNB, in what is being billed as the biggest laundering scandal ever to hit a bank in Norway.
The scandal prompted Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir to call for swift action by regulators to dig into the allegations the company dealt out bribes in exchange for access to Namibian fish harvesting rights and that "no stone should be left unturned" in the investigation.
Separately, Icelandic fishing company Sildarvinnslan is rejecting claims CEO Gunnthor Ingvason sought the help of Samherji as part of an attempt to secure valuable fishing quotas from authorities in Greenland, the website of Icelandic state broadcaster RUV reports, citing Icelandic news site Frettabladid.
