On the 12th of October 1972 a informal group of high ranking state and city officials consisting of; The State Audit, The Custom Office Chief, The Deputy State Prosecutor, The Tax Inspector General, representative from The Criminal Court of Reykjavik, unknown representative from The Chief of Reykjavik Police, a detective from the small town of Kópavogur and K Pétursson, the meeting that day [16] was to discuss the possibility of seizing the bookkeeping from a certain nightclub in Reykjavík. After this meeting, all but The State Audit and The Custom Office Chief, did stage a raid on the nightclub two days later, based on false claim from K Pétursson, that the night club was selling smuggled alcohol and moonshine inside the club and seized the bookkeeping.
At that time it was widely believed, that every night club had something to hide, nothing serious, but still.. The plan was simple, to raid the club under the pretext of looking for unlawful alcohol and seize its bookkeeping. Then, through excessive and unlawful penalty measure, that is to close the Klúbb for indefinite time and by doing so force the owners of the club to seek help from the only source left, The Ministry of Justice [16a].
The Minister of Justice Ó Jóhannesson, also chairman of Framsóknarflokk and as a former professor of law at the University of Iceland, he was bound to see the injustice and point out the problem.
The Klúbb attorney complained to the ministry after three days. Aware of something and careful as not to walk straight into trap the minister/ministry sent a low level representative to the Police Chief S. Sigurðsson. The ministry pointed out to the police the lawlessness of this penalty, which was then consequently called off by the police and the night club was reopened.
K Pétursson at this time a self declared anti-corruption champion and H Einvarðsson Deputy State Prosecutor, wasted no time and, and with the help of some waiting friendly newspapers and journalists [16b] [16c], they promoted the idea that the Justice Minister was a special protector of the owners of the Klúbb. They portrayed themselves as honest investigators trying to do their job but finding their investigations hindered by minister of justice. They claimed it was an obvious case of corruption. Both risking heavy consequences in a case of a coup failure.
Now all they needed to do was to look into the seized bookkeeping and try to find some dirt and then confront the minister through the press and ask him if that was what he was protecting for the corrupt club owners. They assumed that this fragile government would not be able to survive, even a scandal of relatively small magnitude.
Early 1973, after some months of intensive scrutinizing of the bookkeeping they had found nothing. The bookkeeping of the Klúbb was in impeccable order, no dirt no stink, a bad failure and their was plan ruined. There was to be no direct attack on the minister coming from this, no political scandal and his weak government lived to see another day.
And yet a myte was to be born about special relationship between Ó Jóhannesson and corruption and became a mantra for next three years.
The Klúbbaffair case can be seen as a first attempt to try to overthrow this government and as such a “innocent” plan/conspiracy, a straightforward smear campaign much practised at that time of the Intel community. [17] and probably a Icelandic hacked plan, but it did not work and it appeared like the military base was still going be terminated but then something much more outlandish was to come.