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Yachts and private jets are exactly what well-heeled customers of the Café Royal would be expected to own. Indeed, these playthings of the rich and famous will be the subject of discussion in the venue's plush surroundings today.
But the talk will not be so much about exotic holidays on fabulous yachts reached by private airplanes but about the loans handed out by a collapsed Icelandic bank to buy them.
Creditors are scheduled to attend a meeting at the Piccadilly venue to learn about their chances of recouping losses from the British arm of Kaupthing - known as Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander (KSF).
Kaupthing is one of three banks to have been seized by the authorities on the north Atlantic island that once prospered on the back of the financial engineering that dominated the credit boom but has since been hit by the unravelling of the global financial system.
Documents sent to creditors before the meeting with administrator Ernst & Young show how KSF capitalised upon the boom times. Some £300m of its loans were granted for yachts and aviation - a quarter of all loans granted by the group's private banking operation.
KSF's private bank had 400 customers who were loaned a total of £1.2bn. The largest single component of the private bank loan book - 33% - is exposed to British properties.
KSF also had a £824m corporate book, where a quarter of all loans have turned sour, and a £937m property book, where 11% of the loans are on its recoveries list.
This year the operation launched Kaupthing Edge, an internet bank that attracted 170,000 retail depositors, whose £2.6bn of savings have since been taken over by Dutch bank ING. The administrators said a "payment backlog" to 72,000 customers who had been trying to withdraw funds has now been resolved.
KSF was put into administration after an application to the high court by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) on October 8. The City regulator had stepped up its supervision of the operation after the banking crisis caused by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in mid-September and the repercussions this had in Iceland.
"In the period immediately prior to its administration, KSF suffered a continual loss of depositor confidence that resulted in successive daily net outflows from Kaupthing Edge deposit accounts. This led the FSA to take regulatory action," the administrators said.
The problems that brought down KSF are still having repercussions in Iceland, where the government faced calls to resign at the weekend in a demonstration attended by 1.5% of the country's 320,000 population.
But Iceland's prime minister, Geir Haarde, is defying the calls and is instead trying to find a solution to the collapse in the domestic currency. These include the possibility of adopting the euro without actually joining the EU. The country has already called in the IMF, accepting a $2.1bn (£1.4bn) loan to try to shore up its fragile economy.
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