(CNN) -- Former Icelandic Prime Minister Geir Haarde was convicted Monday of negligence related to the collapse of his nation's banking system, but he was cleared of three other charges and will face no punishment, a court official said.
Afterward, Haarde insisted that he'd been acquitted on the most serious charges that deal most directly with the origins and handling of the crisis. He characterized the lone conviction as relatively inconsequential and "ridiculous."
"I have just followed the traditions of all my predecessors as leaders of the Icelandic Cabinet have practiced throughout the decades. And maybe I'm just taking a hit for all of them," Haarde said. "But the point is that this (conviction) has nothing to do with the financial crisis."
Politicians in Europe and beyond have been harshly criticized and, in some cases, forced out of office in the wake of a wave of economic woes, including governments and banks' role in contributing to debt and other crises.
Yet even in all the financial chaos, Iceland has been exceptional -- and only partly because its leader was the first to be criminally charged and, on one count, convicted.
Once one of the world's wealthiest countries per capita, Iceland took a huge hit in 2008 when its banking system collapsed spectacularly, wiping out billions of dollars in savings.
The ripple effect was felt far beyond the island nation, particularly in Britain and the Netherlands.
Those two nation's governments came up with more than $5 billion to bail out its citizens who'd put their money in Iceland-based banks. That prompted a bitter dispute when those countries demanded that Iceland compensate them, as required by a European Union directive.
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