Inga Sæland disputes former minister’s account

Inga Sæland, chair of the People’s Party, has rejected former education and children’s affairs minister Guðmundur Ingi Kristinsson’s account of their communications, saying they experienced the events differently, mbl.is reported.

Guðmundur said earlier on Thursday that Sæland had strongly urged him to resign while he was in hospital recovering from surgery. He said the conversation took place on the third day of Christmas and that he felt she was “kicking a man while he was down”.

“I did not experience it that way,” Sæland said in an interview with RÚV’s evening news. She said she had never tried to enter his hospital room while he was ill and had called his wife only once to ask how he was doing.

Sæland said both of them were hurt by the dispute. She rejected Guðmundur’s claim that he had been made to resign as minister, while acknowledging that they had spoken in the period before his resignation.

She said Guðmundur had resigned from the People’s Party after Easter, several months after the incident he described. Asked whether she believed he was lying, Sæland said she did not want to put it that way.

“He experiences this differently from me. He approaches things differently from me and is unhappy that he is not education and children’s affairs minister today. But I was the one who appointed him to the position, and he was the one who resigned. That is the established fact,” she said.

“There is no question of truth, only experience,” Sæland added. Asked about the breakdown of their friendship, she said she had nothing to say to him unless she happened to run into him.