greekpoliticalissues

Greek Banking Tycoon Andreas Vgenopoulos surprise resignation from his Marfin Investment Group. MIG

2011-11-06T21:00:00.001+02:00

Marfin Investment Group's Andreas Vgenopoulos

Three days ago amidst the political and economic chaos in which Greece has found itself after being unable to repay its debt a development concerning a major financial figure in Greece, banker-lawyer-financier Andreas Vgenopoulos was almost lost in the panic of the EU and international markets over the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, of Greece defaulting on its massive debt.

A short press relase by Vgenopoulos, the head of the MIG Group, (MIG is backed by 5 billion USD from Dubai) which is the largest owner of Greek businesses, including Olympic Air, Marfin Bank, Thd Attica Shipping Group (Blue Star Ferries), Marfin Laiki Bank, Hygeia Health Care (leading Hospitals), the Cyprus Hilton and a host of other companies said that the charismatic tycoon was resigning from the presidency and board of Marfin Laiki Bank group based in Cyprus. The reason Vgenopoulo gave was that because of the 50% (EU and IMF) imposed haircut on Greek bonds and the probability that the Cyrpus authorities would ask for the banking group to increase its cash deposits to 9%, something that would lead to nationalisation of the bank by the Cyprus government and the imposition of a new board of directors, he was leaving the management of Marfin Laiki.

The press release came as a shock to Greek financial and political circles who were not used to seeing the combatative lawyer/financier giving up a battle on the basis of a potential government decision.

There seems to be more to this story, and invitably rumours and scenarios have swamped Greek and other financial circles, and one in particular, heard in Cyprus, is that Vgenopoulos is rumoured to have had a bitter falling out with his Dubai Group partner Balaoiui because the latter had recently done business with the Vardinoyannis Greek shipping,media and energy family, something that would be anathema to Vgenopoulos who is locked in a bitter series of public confrontations with the Vardinoyannis over the management of the historic Panathinaikos Football Club in which they both have shares. Things were not made better in the recent past when a Vardinoyannis family member lodged a criminal complaint against Vgenopoulos for defamation. This was widely broadcast, in an unusually one-sided manner by several anchor journalists on prime time news at MEGA and STAR TV, two leading Greek TV channels belonging to the Vardinoyannis family.

If indeed Vgenopoulos' MIG Laiki Bank partner did initiate business with any members of the Vardinoyannis family then one could how this could have been seen as a Causus Belli for a betrayed Vgenopoulos.

Whatever the truth is regarding the resignation the fact is that the MIG group has lost one of Greece's most talented financiers and, rare in Greece, a tycoon/manager who has never been tainted by scandal or rumours of crooked dealings. It is MIG's loss, and also that of the group's shareholders, and without doubt a major loss for Dubai's investors in Marfin Laiki.

As Greece is crushed by German and EU imposed poverty unpaid German Debt to Greece stands at 60bn Euro.

2011-11-02T14:56:00.001+02:00

From the MailOnline -

Festeringanger, Nazi war crimes and the £60bn the Greeks believe the Germans owe them

By David Thomas

Lastupdated at 8:55 AM on 2nd November 2011

Slaughter:By the time Hitler's men had left the Greek village of Distomo, 218 men, womenand children were dead

The SSindulged their bloodlust on men, women and children alike. While homes andshops blazed around them like some hellish inferno, women were violated andthose who were pregnant were stabbed in the guts. Small babies were bayonetedin their cribs. The village priest was beheaded.

By the timeHitler’s men had left the Greek village of Distomo near the ancient town ofDelphi on that bloody day in June 1944, 218 people were dead.

TheWaffen-SS was pleased with its work: the local partisans who had dared toattack a German unit had been taught a bitter lesson in revenge.

Theslaughter at Distomo was such an outrage that, in 2003, even a German FederalCourt judge described it as ‘one of the most despicable crimes of World WarII’.

But herefused to grant the families of the victims any compensation for theirsuffering, and not a single German soldier was ever punished for what he andhis comrades had done.

The Distomomassacre is just one example of the terrible suffering endured by the people ofGreece during World War II and, some would say, of the German government’sreluctance to pay for the crimes committed against the Greeks in their nation’sname.

Countlessother villages could tell of similar atrocities. Some 60,000 Greek Jews — morethan three-quarters of the nation’s Jewish population — were rounded up andsent to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Yet,neither the massacres of villagers nor the ethnic cleansing of the Jews was thedeadliest of torments inflicted on Greece. For the worst Nazi war crimes of allwere essentially economic.

Hitler’stroops helped themselves to everything, stealing goods and food to such adegree that hundreds of thousands of Greeks were left destitute and starving. Atleast 300,000 Greeks died as a result.

Greektroops march from Koritza towards the front in 1941. After Germany defeated theGreek army, the Nazis set about treating the country the same way they didtheir other conquests: as a fiefdom to be abused and exploited.

Some 60,000Greek Jews ¿ more than three-quarters of the nation¿s Jewish population ¿ wererounded up and sent to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz (pictured)and Treblinka

Hitler’smen even raided the Greeks’ central bank, forcing them to give Germany amassive ‘war loan’ — one that has never been paid back, more of which later. Economistsestimate that if it were repaid today, it could cost the German government£60billion. The memory of that travesty has been reignited this week by Greeksangry at the austerity measures being imposed on them — primarily by Germany asit seeks to stop the euro crisis spinning out of control.

‘There havebeen reparations to individuals, but not to Greece itself. Every other countryin Europe had reparations apart from Greece. It’s not fair to say Greeks shoulddie for free’

Greeks arenow comparing the current German government to the Nazis who once occupiedthem.

A year intoWorld War II, the Greeks had managed to stay clear of the conflict that hadengulfed the rest of Europe. Hitler was not interested in Greece: he had biggerfish to fry.

But one manwas spoiling for a fight. Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, wasdesperate to show Hitler that he, too, could launch a blitzkrieg.

And so, inOctober 1940 the Italians attacked Greece. They made some gains at first, butwere soon driven back to where they had started. In March 1941, the Italiansmounted another attack, but this was a total failure.

It was atthis point that Hitler lost patience with his incompetent ally and intervened. Heordered the all-conquering German forces to sweep down through Yugoslavia andthen overrun Greece. By early May 1941, Greece was under German control.

BenitoMussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy, was desperate to show Hitler that he,too, could launch a blitzkrieg. And so, in October 1940 the Italians attackedGreece

The Nazisset about treating Greece the same way they did their other conquests: as afiefdom to be abused and exploited.

Ashistorian Roger Moorhouse, author of Berlin At War and an expert on wartimeGermany, explains: ‘The Nazis systematically stripped Occupied Europe ofeverything it had.

‘They weredesperate to keep the Home Front onside. The spectre of starvation in Germany,and the loss of support for the war that had caused it, loomed large in theirminds and it was something they wanted to avoid.

‘So theytook honey from Greece, wheat from the Ukraine, wine and Cognac from France,bacon from Denmark and so forth. Whether you got compensated depended on yourrace.

‘In France,whose people were considered civilised, the chances were you might get paid foryour produce, albeit at a very disadvantageous rate. If you were a Ukrainian,and thus a subhuman Slav, it would simply be confiscated. The Greeks weresouthern nobodies in Nazi eyes.’

As aresult, Greek businesses, property and goods, including olive oil, leather,tobacco and cotton, were either seized outright or bought with a new,near-worthless currency called ‘Occupation Marks’.

To makematters worse, the Royal Navy mounted a blockade of Greece, resulting in aterrible shortage of food, especially in the big cities. By the end of 1941,the Red Cross estimated that 400 people a day were dying from starvation inAthens alone.

The Germansresponded to this gathering humanitarian disaster with indifference. Hitler’shenchman Hermann Goering, whose love of fine food had left him morbidly obese,told the leaders of Germany’s occupied territories: ‘I could not care less whenyou say that people under your administration are dying of hunger. Let themperish, so long as no German starves.’

Hitler¿shenchman Hermann Goering told the leaders of Germany¿s occupied territories: ¿Icould not care less when you say that people under your administration aredying of hunger. Let them perish, so long as no German starves.'

The Greekshave not forgotten what they call The Great Famine. Nor has what one might callThe Great Theft slipped their minds either. Because the Germans didn’t justwreck the Greek economy, seize its products and starve its people. They tookits money, too.

In Februarylast year, the Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos fumed: ‘TheGermans took away Greek money and never gave it back.’

It was Nazipolicy to make the people they conquered pay for their own oppression. At itsmost obscene, the Jews had to pay for their tickets on the cattle trucks thattook them to the gas chambers. In Greece, the procedure was marginally morecivilised.

On March14, 1942, a team of German and Italian lawyers, in the absence of any Greeks,signed an agreement obliging the Bank of Greece to provide Germany with a ‘warloan’ of 476million Reichsmarks (a currency which preceded the Deutschmark). And70 years later not one penny of it, let alone any interest, has been repaid.

Economists(German ones, as it happens) have calculated that, allowing purely forinflation, Greece’s 1942 loan to Germany would today be worth £9bn. But if oneadds even a modest rate of interest of 3 per cent, then that debt increases toa staggering £60bn.

That wouldbe enough to cover Greece’s fiscal deficit for the next five years, giving thecountry time to restructure its economy and put government finances on a moresustainable footing.

Anger: Lastyear, Greek Deputy Prime Minister Theodoros Pangalos fumed: 'The Germans tookaway Greek money and never gave it back'

And it’snot as if Germany couldn’t afford to pay up. The Bundesbank has more than 3,500tons of gold in its vaults, worth over £200bn. But does it owe any of that toGreece?

Neither theGerman Embassy nor the German government are willing to comment on the issue. Butthe Greeks have no doubt where the truth lies.

In thewords of a spokesman at the Greek Embassy in London: ‘There was a loan, and wehave still not got anything back from Germany. The Germans deny it. They say:“We have helped you with reparations.”

‘But thosewere nothing compared with this sum. There have been reparations toindividuals, but not to Greece itself. Every other country in Europe hadreparations apart from Greece. It’s not fair to say Greeks should die forfree.’

In Greekeyes, the Germans are lucky that the sum at issue is only £60bn. They point toa finding made at the 1945 Paris Conference on Reparations that Greece shouldreceive compensation from Germany equivalent to more than £90bn today.

The Greekgovernment, however, has never raised this issue when negotiating with the EUover the Greek debt crisis.

PrimeMinister George Papandreou says: ‘It would be easy for people with bad faith tointerpret this as a sign of weakness, that we are looking for an alibi to shirkour responsibilities.’

So couldthe Greeks take the German government to court to get their money back?

Accordingto City lawyer Graham Defries: ‘In principle, there’s no reason why one can’tpursue an action of this kind. Debt doesn’t just get extinguished.

‘Ininternational finance, the concept of an interest-free loan doesn’t exist, andit can’t legitimately be described as a loan if the money was obtained bycoercion. So it’s a crime, and therefore not covered by previous reparations.’

In otherwords, the German government may have a moral duty to give the Greeks theirmoney back. It might even have an economic interest in doing so — since a Greekdefault would cost the German economy far more than £60bn.

A Greek Spring? Parade Disruptions Across Greece Terrify the Political Establishment

2011-10-28T23:35:00.000+03:00

Communist Party cadres protect parliamentarians from protesting citizens demonstrating against the passing of new austerity measures. Riot police look on from Parliament steps

Hundreds of thousands of citizens from all walks of life in dozens of towns as well as in the three major cities of Greece today broke the tidy ranks which normally wave small national flags and clap as military units and schoolchildren parade before platforms on which representatives of the government, the church, municipal and other authorites stand to attention in an annual national patriotic ceremony to celebrate the "NO" declaration of the Greek nation to Mussolini's demand for Greece to allow his Fascist troops to march through the country in 1940. Today waves of citizens chanted 'Thieves" and "Traitors" at the officials on the bunting decked platforms as police stood by. They terrified members of the political establishment, whom everyone considers responsible for the economic collapse of Greece.

In Thesaloniki, the northern Greek capital, a crowd of 50,000 quickly lent its voice to a tsunami of protest. The situation was repeated in dozens of cities across Greece. The president of the Republic, Carolos Papoulias, pale and visibly shaken by the chants of the booing crowd made up of people whose pensions, salaries and job prospects had been once again reduced in yet another agreement with the IMF and the EU ill-advisedly and short sightedly declared to TV crews present that the protest was the action of a small group of people of whom he was "ashamed".

Protected by a large contingent of bodyguards, he and the other officials were forced to leave the officials platform which was immediately occupied by ordinary citizens as the parade got under way without the presence of politicians. The same scene repeated itself in towns across Greece, while some MP's were physically attacked and verbally abused. Where they could not be dislodged by the crowds owing to large presence of riot police and metal barriers as in Athens, schoolchildren turned their faces the other way as they marched past the officials in protest at government policies, while the Municipal Band members of Athens paraded with black ribbons of protest attached to their musical instruments.

More frightening for the politicians was that this was a universal reaction of citizens who consider that members of parliament and ministers have ruined the country by ransacking the state's finances for their own benefit, and had voted for the scandalous Venizelos Constitutional Amendment no.86 which gives immunity to ministers who indulge in felonious behaviour.

Today the frustration of repeated economic austerity measures, 17 new taxes, a crippling real estate tax attached to electricity bills and other measures coupled to a universal belief by the Greek people that politicians who are responsible for massive corruption, gross mismanagement, close relatiosn with a closed group of media and business oligarchs, has led to what, for those of us who have experienced revolutions and civil unrest has all the markings of a Greek "Spring".

What was surprising was that all the political parties, with one exception, made accusatory declarations regarding "small groups", "troublemakers", "people who wished to blacken a day of national memory" and those who wanted to "stop a national historic parade" . It was clear that the politicians were totally out of step with the public, having refused once more to see the huge signs pointing to the beginning of a universal uprising in Greek society against those who had ruined the economy by looting the national economy in partnership with corrupt German and other EU corporations and filled the vaults of Swiss, French, German and British banks with billions of stolen Greek Euros which neither Mrs Merckel, who knowns the score, nor Mr Sarkhozi, nor other EU leaders, or the Troika have ever made reference to, instead forcing punitive and impoverishing conditions on the Greek public as a whole, with no end in sight.

The scenes of cheering crowds clapping their hands for the parading soldiers and school children once the politicians had been driven from their official platforms was a vision of the future. Similar scenes from Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and Iran come to mind where military and the citizenry embraced each other. The political symbolism of a leading army jeep's driver and codriver clapping as they drove along the parade avenue, cheered on by ecstatic crowds of middle and working class Greeks must have been a chilling omen for the political and power estabishement of what is to come.

Interestingly, like all power structures that become entrenched and unable to react to demands for social and political reform, all declarations by politicians were ones of anger and accusation. Most spoke of "nationally divisive tactics" - a totally misleading reading of what was happening on the streets and throughout Greece, which unusally presented a united front, this time against the political establishment and its German and French banking sponsors. Another sign of politicians being trapped and unable to identify with the people was that even the Communist party closed ranks with the government, as it did a few days ago when protesting crowds in front of Parliament threatened to enter the building when there was a house debate designed to pass a law imposing crippling EU and IMF economic restrictions. On that occasion the Communist cadres, carrying long wooden battons. lined up around parliament to protect it from the crowds in front of the building, as bemused riot police relaxed on parliament's steps behind the Communist party "stewards" guarding the parliamentarians.

It is clear that what we predicted two years ago, that degradation of the state, corruption of the body politic and the unwillngness of the EU (whose multinationals were partners-in-crime with local henchmen) and Greek politicians to send crooked politicians to jail and recover the looted billions would lead to civil unrest and the establishment of a new society has started to happen. Media groups today spoke of "shameful behaviour on a national day" and " humiliation by small organised groups". It is sad that leading journalists have adopted embattled government and opposition party views. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that the government controls broadcasting licences and where government advertising revenue goes, but the mainstream meadia newscasters have, by repeating government propaganda, put themselves firmly on the decks of a sinking vessel.

Greece is going through a transformation that few would have imagined five years ago. Parliament may have overwhelmingy passed the Venizelos Constitutional Amendment no.86 to protect from prosecution its members who brought Greece to its present economic humiliation, but the Greek public, who see their children emigrating, their parents becoming destitute and the EU and IMF taxing them into poverty, today sent a message that Greeks recognise NO statute of limitations. If the pols understand what happened in Greece today, few of them will be sleeping tonight.

The Greek Debt Crisis -Papandreou Government Vice President Pagalos Claims He Cannot Pay the New Real Estate Tax

2011-09-30T17:57:00.001+03:00

The Greek government's vice president, Theodore Pagalos, known for his ascerbic tongue, huge apetite, litigiously low tolerance to criticism (he sued a 24 year old blogger just this week for 1 million Euros for an article Pagalos did not like) diplomatic gaffes and short temper is a man who does not go unnoticed.

The corpulent Socialist government minister, grandson of a notorious Greek right- wing dictator of the same name who, in a show of nationalistic morality, ordered all women to wear their skirts a prescribed distance below the knee. Policemen at that time were ordered by the elder Pagalos to patrol the streets of Greek cities with a tape measure and a pair of scissors. Women whose skirts were shorter than those approved of by the dictator had their skirts slit by kneeling policemen carrying out their professional duty. Theodore Pagalos, the Younger, the Papandreou government's vice-president, was once again in the news this week when he declared on television that he was unable to pay a 7,000 Euro additional tax on his property and he added provocatively "Let Venizelos (the Minister of Economy) arrest me!" (Knowing of course, even if he was not joking, that no parliamentarian can be arrested and that none have ever been convicted in a court in Greece for nearly 40 years - a very sore point for Greek citizens who have seen the way politicians have voted for a series of laws and a constitutional amendment to allow themselves practical immunity for all crimes, however serious.)

So far so good, since this only brought smiles to those who know how well-paid senior politicians are in Greece (Pagalos office cell phone bills alone, paid by the taxpayer, are in the region of 40,000 Euros a year) but Greeks struggling for their very survival were not amused to hear that he owns a reported 58 properties. He admitted that he had inherited all of them, not something to endear him to Greek families struggling to pay off a single property or two purchased often after years of holding down two jobs and scraping to save to pay for a modest roof over their heads. .

See the NE.O.S article through the link below (only in Greek)

http://www.neolaialaos.gr/2011/09/29/news/12924/

This item, regarding Pagalos dozens of properties, was widely read in Greece when it appeared on the Popular Orthodox Greek Rally (LA.OS) political party's Youth Wing NE.OS blogsite - interestng because in one of those twists of fate the head of LA.OS, George Karatzaferis, a former bodybuilder, journalist, seller of hay and owner of a modelling agency in the '70s, without whose approval the article could not have been written, himself owns 32 apartments, villas and other properties. Greeks without jobs and those wondering whether they will be fired before Xmas in accordance to the newest EU directive for 30,000 more civil servants to be sacked, watched the developing skirmish between the two property tycoon politicians bemusedly. Perhaps it was a rivalry of style, Pagalos inherited his vast property holding while Karatzaferis repeatedly tells his audiences and repeats to the media that he made his money himself.

An Athenian story, or as they say in Greece "A story of everyday lunacy".

The Looting of Greece - IMF and ECB support the transfer of 150BnE of National Assets to an Offshore Company

2011-09-29T19:17:00.002+03:00

The Greek crisis has many sides to it but the point has been reached where one wonders when the country will erupt in uncontrolled anger at the punitive measures being imposed every month by what seems to be a weak government which is slavishly on its knees to its IMF lenders.

Every step taken with the ECB and the IMF "Troika" has resulted in a deeper dive into an economic depression of unheard of proportions for a country that has managed to survive wars, invasion, civil unrest, juntas,mismanagement and thievery by its politicians and their domestic and foreign partners-in-crime. Every new measure imposed by the arrogant cabal surrounding the Prime Minister, George Papandreou, has further smothered the economy, killed hundreds of thousands of businesses - primarily medium and small ones with a few employees and a family which has had the business as its only livelihood.

The recent spate of crippling taxes on people's homes, a tax which has been attached to their electricity bills, is just another blow to Mr and Mrs Average. These are people who worked all their lives putting their hard earned savings into one or two apartments, or a shop, to give themselves the security that the state could not provide.

Stories break every day of harebrained government measures to "beat tax evasion" or to "reduce public spending" - measures which are as surreal and weird as dead black vultures would be if they suddenly dropped by their thousands on people's balconies and gardens. Each new measure when it is announced is already dead in its tracks, defeating the purpose of boosting the economy and increasing taxable revenues with which to repay the massive national debt, national in the sense that the whole country is being called on to repay it, but not national in that it is the result of the actions, legal and illegal, of an isolated political caste that has locked itself in the magnificently remodelled luxury sand-coloured neoclassical former palace in the centre of Athens that houses Parliament and its 300 functionaries. Instructions have been given to riot police bearing tanks of crippling chemical spray and full riot gear to attack and beat back any citizen who ventures onto the lowest step of the staircase leading to the entrance of the building where the rulers and their colleagues continue in a frenzy, passing laws and presidential decrees by the dozen, to bleed the nation's already anaemic citizens and transfer the contents to the Troika's financial institutions.

Yesterday, to add insult to grave injury of a nation bled like a newborn French calf being prepared as choice white veal for another feast, a local paper revealed a plan for the Papandreou government to transfer 150 billion Euro of national assets to a Luxembourg company which would sell them off gradually until 2025 to pay part of our national debt and to buy back Greek bonds.

The treasonous, there can be no other name for it if the report is true, transfer will mean that the very core of the nation's publc assets will no longer belong to Greece.

Yes, the buildings and the museums and the parks and the airports and the hospitals and the government ministries and the churches and the roads will still be here, but their ownership will, in one fell swoop, be transferred, as half of the gold reserves of the Bank of Greece have been, to foreign custody and ownership. These assets, according to the leaked reports, will be sold at prices to be set by the board members of the Luxenbourg company - clearly not Greeks but Germans, Swiss, French and other foreigners.

One can imagine the perks and the salaries and the kickbacks involved as well as the fees for financial consultants who will set up the whole transfer. 700 Million Euros was paid for "advice" on just two financial transactions by the Greek government in the past, how much will it be on 150 billion Euros of our natonal assets when the merchant banks and financial houses come in for the big feast? Probably 1.5 -3 billion Euros in fees alone.

If the transfer story is indeed true then there is little doubt that what Greece must do is immediately call a stop on all its payments, offer 20 cents on the dollar to the IMF, the ECB and on its bonds - as an alternative to declaring immediate default (default means that at elats 7 French and German banks will go bust the next day), withdraw from the Euro and declare a five or ten year moratorium on all foreign payments.

If the country is to survive, its people not to be faced with famine and national assets to remain in the custody of the people, then immediate action by the public is required. Let us go back NOW to the Drachma, which served us well. How can a looted country governed by a corrupt elite with crooked parliamentarians survive when it has no control over its money supply? The drachma will allow us to boost the economy by increasing the money supply, curb inflation when necessary by reducing it and working to an ordered economy by fine tuning what money is available to meet specific demands, a necessary and essential facility that the ECB (a German and French run institution) has taken away the power of us doing. Greece can neither print more Euros to meet local fical demands nor withdraw Euros to control inflation and to reign in the economy when (when indeed?) it is soaring.

Back to the Drachma then, OUT of the Eurozone, stop all external non-private payments and use the money going to our massive repayments to the black hole of the IMF and the ECB to kickstart our economy, create hundreds of thousands of new private sector jobs, cancel all taxes imposed in the lqst two years and legislate for a new, universal tax of 15% (for all incomes and VAT).

This will free the system of its tax mechanism deadlock, allow Greeks to change their attitude towards taxes, and increase government revenues. From a country which is bankrupt there can be no benefit for anyone (except for a small circle of crooks in the political/financial system):from a country that has clear cut financial rules, a comprehensible and fair tax system, and cash to boost its economy while the foreign payments moratorium is in place, revenues will roll in to government coffers, a portion of which can be used to build a treasure chest to eventually pay off the 20% of the foreign debt and bonds that we will recognise as being a fair debt burden.

The message "Take it or Leave" to the ECB, the IMF and those lenders who had a party with Greece's fnances will have put things in order.

A new lean and mean Greece wll have been born.

As for the corrupt ruling caste and their foreign partners like Siemens who savaged the country's economy and loaded the citizenry with debt and inflated costs for public sector projects and machinery, it will be the time for a new judicial system with special courts able to quickly mete out fair and crushing sentences on those who thought that the Greek middle class, and of course to a degree the working class, were there to sacrifice everything they had worked for.

A new criminal code that will be drawn up by the People, for the People and which wll be carried out By the People is the hope that a new day will begin for a nation that has quietly seen the vultures of Europe and Wall Street, with a flock of their bastard cousins ensconsed in Parliament, feasting for decades, and more so today, on the savings and indeed the very Body Politic of the nation that gave the world institutions that today no longer function in the Republic of Hellas.

If the tone of this article is unusually shrill, take little notice since it is no more, by comparison, than the warble of a robin compared to the universal banshee wail about to be heard from the throats of ten million anguished Greeks.

Greek Crisis: A Provocative Horst Reichenbach Taunts Beleaguered Greek Taxpayers During his Athens Visit

2011-09-16T15:25:00.002+03:00

Greek Citizens Demonstrating against Corrupt Parliamentarians and Against EU/IMF Imposed Financial Penalties and Wage Reductions

As if living in a country which has, for all intents and purposes, become bankrupt owing to decades of political mismanagment, a closed business environment which virtually excluded foreign investors and a political system whereby members of the main parliamentary parties used government posts to enrich crooked politicians in both major parties by ransacking the economy for personal and party gain, Greek citizens were faced this week with extreme provocation during the visit of Mr Horst Reichenbach, an officer of the European Commission's Task Force overseeing the incremental bailout of Greece by foreign financial institutions.

Greece has, as everyone knows, been in the uneviable position of being in the world spotlight for its dire economic situation, but for the Greek taxpayers and their families who have been called on by their government, the IMF and the EU, to pay for the sins of the politicians it was another stab in the back.
The citizenry have been faced with crippling extra taxes, reduced pensions, whole salaries being taken away while the now standard extortion formula of "scare them by saying there will be no money for pensions and civil service salaries as of next month" just before each new installment from the IMF, allowing the government to add new taxes ad hoc. The whole country is in a mood of aggravation and often deep depression with the once distant spectre of personal destruction and penury now a very real occurence for hundreds of thousands of households unable to pay for the extra money demanded in the three monthly punitive directives issued by the government and the Hunnish financial raids ordered by the ECB. the IMF, and the Task Force.

The latter body is personified by the image of a smiling and nonchalant Mr Reichenbach giving press statements characterized by a total lack of social sensitivity and lack of awareness, or worse still, indifference, concenring the domestic and workplace drama facing most Greek citizens and their children today. It is not, for Greeks who have tasted, within living memory, the efficiency and lack of compassion in the execution (figuratively and literally) of punitive measures by the Germans - the time for such arrogance, (currently a case is before the international courts regarding the unprovoked slaughter by German forces of 214 unarmed Greek citizens by German troops during WWII when Greece was beign governed by the Germand with a local Quisling government) is not now. It would seem that the German officials putting the screw, not on the Greek government, whose members after all are mostly wealthy politicians, but on the People who are being treated to a financial and social waterboarding on a daily basis, should be more careful and act with more humility and request as they walk from minsitry to ministry in a city like Athens whose inhabitants their compatriots had reduced to starvation and the economy to destruction in the near past.

Mr Reichenbach this week, on a visit to Athens, tested that most sacred of Greek virtues, filoxenia, which is generosity towards strangers and visitors, a cultural trait inherited from the Ancient Greeks who had among their many Gods Dias, the God of Hospitality. The Reichenbach visit came after what may be the last straw which he demanded be cast on the broken back of Hellas's families and economy when the government announced that it was, as of October, imposing another extra tax on all dwellings, a tax which would be added to burden of hundreds of thousands of households unable to meet their electricity bill: a new property tax which was accompanied by the government stating that anyone who did not pay the extra heavy apartment and house ownership penalty within 60 days would have their electricity cut off. Today the government clarified that not only woudl the electricity be cut off, but that those unable to apy would have their homes confiscated. There can be no legality in these directives and it is a matter of time before a serious backlash results.

Under the threat of living out this winter with their children, aged parents and sick family members, in total darkness in their dwellings - without hot water, without the ability to cook food or run refrigerators, heating systems and washing machines, or the ability for their school age children to study and use their computers in the dark, Greeks saw on television the confidant image of Herr Reichenbach, while hosted generously by the Greeks, repeating that "money is not the issue, there is money" while he pointed out, again that the EU Commission;s Task Force for Greece which he represented was here to see about that more efficient tax collecting machinery would be put into place and to make the present system of collecting (fines, taxes and penalties) more effective in extracting more money from Greek taxpayers.

Greeks, those who cannot in many cases still face watch the dismal and threatening messages put out every evening on prime time news hour by all the local TV stations, angrily demanded to know why this man, and indeed all the visitng EU and IMF officials who demand more taxes from the Greek public, have not once said A WORD regarding the estimated 300 Billion Euros now in German, and other EU and Offshore paradise banks, money which has been siphoned off and stolen by Greek politicians in partnerhsip with German and other multinationals, money that the German prosecutors themselves have admitted was paid to politicians by companies such as Siemens and others (100 million Euros alone is declared by the German authorities as having been given by Siemens to their Greek partners-in-crime).

Mr Reichenbach and his colleagues who come to Greece to make sure that the financial scaling of the weakend Greek household continues, with no compassion, and without one demand by the EU official that the stolen money that has passed into and through his own country's banks should be returned. Not one word was uttered in public by him to demand that his corrupt fellow politicians in Greece should be made to return the money - to transfuse it back to the dying Greek economy - to allow Greece thus to recover from its haemmoraged state. But then again what could we expect of this man who made his various statements while sitting next to the Greek Vice President, Minister of Economics "Benny" Venizelos, the consitutional law professor minister who engineered and helped pass perhaps the most notorious and damaging constitutional amendment in Greek history, Amendment 86, which made it practically impossible to indict, let alone try, crooked government ministers, an amendment that gave organized international political crime gangs total freedom to steal, embezzle and to violate both the country's coffers and its legal system by forcing any happless and honest prosecutor who saw evidence of a politician committing a crime, to immediately be forced to stop the investigation and send the criminal file to Parliament.

Parliament, by using law 86, recently exonerated several politicians whom the press and others had implicated in huge financial scandals concerning bribes or the ransacking of public coffers, while other politicans who were accused of massively enriching themselves illegally or worse, were let off the hook by their parliamentary colleagues when opposition party leaders, primarily those of the New Democracy party (as they had done before) ordered their members to leave parliament, supposedly in protest, and not vote for the initiation of an indictement procedure against the minsiter whose name had become implicated in financial scandals.

The result in these cases was that the accused implicated politicans were let off, scott free, because of a lack of a parliamentary quorum of the required number of votes to indict them. Greek viewers who saw Mr Reichenbach with Mr Venizelos at his side felt that the tragicomedy of the Greek politico-financial drama seemed to be playing out perhaps one of its last cynical acts before a public reaction sets in. A reaction that may take forms inconcievable for a western democacy until a few months ago when the public in Greece started verbally abusing and physically attacking politicians wherever they saw them.

Mr Venizlos and Mr Reichenbach have made their stand clear - punitive taxes, penalties and jail for Greeks unable to pay debts of more than 5,000E for arbitrarily imposed penalties and taxes. The question is what will the hundreds of thousands of Greek family members do when in three months time they are left in the cold of winter, without electricity, without heat and without food, in order to please Mr Reichenbach and his Greek colleagues in Parliament who daily reiterate their commitment to extract more money from Greek citizens in order to service the usurious debt repayment schedule imposed by the IMF and the EU with Greek political complicity?

For once the bets are that it will be better to be at home, even in those without electricity and heat, than in Parliament and in the suite of the 5 star hotel where Mr Reichenbach and his politico-banker colleagues will be staying. The reason need not be explained. In the end the chickens always come home to roost.

The Discounting of Greece - the economy as a Paper Chase

2011-05-27T12:57:00.006+03:00

For the last year and a half Greece has been squeezed in an ever tightening vise with catastrophic results for its ailing economy and for the lives of millions of its citizens. The much vaunted application to the IMF for a bailout, which now seems to have been organised before the present Papandreou government took power in 2009 (despite denials by the government) has failed miserably for Greece, but not of course for all those advisers and institutions that have received huge fees for their services. The IMF bailout came after several years of mismanagement, political favoritism regarding government and local contracts, huge bribes paid by primarily German companies - the increased costs from "padding" being shouldered by the Greek taxpayer - and worst of all, the discounting of the whole economy by the use of "chits" against future state revenues.

This cash received against future income, whether for the highly profitable highway toll system, the airports and other cash cows went to cover present and past debts, and left the country short of income. It is no accident that in the last decade a Tsunami of paper was issued by the Greek state, demolishing all hopes of a beneficial cash flow into state and local authority coffers in the years to come. Of course there were profitable investments like those made by certain pension funds in structured bonds, but strangely it is these that have come up before the courts, and then again selectively, with criminal accusations being levelled against the managers of financial institutions and the pension fund managers, while politicians who were in charge were left out of the picture by the prosecutors.

What made Greece suddenly turn its attention to discounting its own future? Cash flow problems created by political mismanagement, or perhaps an awakening among government officials that large, and legal, so far, commissions were being made by advisors? Could there have been a Damascus Moment for a minister who suddenly saw that before him stood the Golden Calf of Baal (sorry for the mixed religious imagery!), and a way to make hundreds of millions in shared commissions, safe in the knowledge that should this be construed ever as illegal kickback for the minister he would be safe from prosecution, protected in a cocoon of immunity by the very laws that ministers themselves in parliament had passed regarding parliamentary impunity, something which they themselves had further guaranteed to their cronies and themselves by the now infamous Constitutional Amendment no 86, that made it impossible, practically, for any prosecutor to indict a thieving parliamentarian or minister.

So Greece discounted its future, undertook impossible repayment terms under the IMF bailout of 2010 which left the country with every third shop closed, millions of unemployed workers and middle class professionals, hundreds of thousands of homes without electricity owing to the practice of the state owned electricity company to cut off power supply to those unable to meet just two domestic electricity bills. Worse is the dire situation among Greece's bright and formerly productive youth now reduced to looking at every new day without hope of employment.

The government, unable and unwilling to immediately root out and punish those dozens of parliamentarians who have a lifestyle above their means, nor to lock up corrupt ministers or those around them about whom the media and foreign prosecutors refer to regarding allegedly massive private fortunes and huge contract kickbacks, in the meantime continues with a daily media bombardment of threats of imprisonment and the enactment of new laws for imprisonment for minor income tax infractions designed to terrify an economically weakened populace unable to meet its daily obligations. The existence of a corrupt and massively wealthy political inner caste in public life seems to have intertwined roots in both the political parties which have shared power in the last 40 years, and as a result the opposition seems unable throw out those with a suspect past in its own party and gain the trust of the voting public fed up with the tenants of the Greek state's political penthouse.

The IMF and the ECB have consistently turned the screws on the Papandreou government for more restrictive measures on the Greek economy and for actions against tax evasion, but have not once publicly addressed the question of the untaxed and stolen politicians billions located in Swiss, German and other primarily European banks. Figures of 600 billion Euros in Switzerland belonging to Greeks keep floating to the top of media and political discussions. This figure re personal deposits in the land of chocolates and cheese is twice the total debt of Greece.

The worst is to come- in a totally ham-fisted and politically shortsighted attempt to blackmail the wallowing Greek government Eurogroup's Jean Claude Junker said that the fifth IMF payment for Greece, due in July, was in doubt, and this was followed by a Greek minister announcing, to justify further squeezes, that Greece would be unable to meet its payments if this money was not received. A clear threat to pensioners and those on public salaries.

As an across the board Spanish inspired facebook protest movement brought thousands of demonstrators outside Parlaiment in Athens these last two days, and in other cities also,our warning of months ago of the threat of serious civil strife has started to show its until now hidden face among the thousands of shadows cast by those peaceful, for the moment, citizens who are taking to the streets.

Perhaps it is time for Greece to call Junker's and the IMF/ECB's bluff regarding a stop in payments and for Greece to declare a unilateral moratorium on all overseas payments, and instead to use the money going to the IMF and elsewhere, to pay wages and salaries here, and to invest in the local economy to boost it.

The sums needed here are much less than what we are having to pay our lenders of last resort and their millionaire/billionaire advisers in fees for their services. (A reported 700 million USD to Goldman Sachs alone for previous advice). And perhaps it is time for us to finally wrest back control over our national money supply, and thus the machinery to control and boost our economy by investing in local businesses and public works again by rejecting the Euro and going back to our trusted, traditional and historic currency, the Drachma, which never in the last 2 generations, let us down. A currency devaluation, of our own volition, while painful initially, would boost tourism, exports and our competitiveness, while the Eurogroup/IMF solution, also painful, holds no promise for us, only a continued and guaranteed road to economic and social ruin.

The Euro and its mechanisms brought inflation and massive corruption to the wealth creation pyramid of the national economy, where surplus value was formerly created by the many, at the bottom of the pyramid, and filtered up, less and less to those at the top, who thus had less chance to put it in their pockets. The new Euro model created a money flow for the pyramid where the majority of funds, hundreds of billions, came in through the top, from the EU, directly into the control of a handful of Greek ministers, who decided where and to whom the EU funding should go. There was therefore no more interest or political will to create a competitive business environment to attract foreign investment or to make the playing field level.

A handful of players now called the shots, together with their political partners and Greece became what it is today, a bankrupt state with a massively wealthy and inbred Third World style politico-business plutocracy for whom the suffering of 10 million citizens is to be monitored from marble and glass mansions and dozens of summer homes in fashionable islands or from the airconditioned lounges of superyachts cruising the Aegean and Ionian Seas every summer.

Will Greece pick up the gauntlet cast down by Mr Junker, Mr Strauss Kahn (!) and the IMF, and stand up for its citizens, while also cleaning house at the top, or will we see a further deterioration of the economy and the collapse of the tearing social fabric with new institutions to handle political provocations regarding corruption, such as those foreseen a few days ago by journalist Zervos on BlueSky TV who spoke of the likelihood "not of courts, but of summary court proceedings"to handle the total backlog of so-far-immune politicians who have looted a nation of its present and its future.

We shall soon see.

London 2012, Will Security Matters make this the Last Olympic Games Roadshow?

2011-04-16T23:20:00.008+03:00

We voiced our concerns in 2009 about security issues for tourists planning to visit London for the 2012 Olympic Games. As the Games approach we are reposting the article for our new readers -

Ever since 1896 when the sacred games of Ancient Olympia in Greece were revived in Athens the so called Modern Olympics have been the greatest road show on earth, stopping at a different city every four years. The Olympic Games, which began again in 1896 as an amateur event in which athletes competed only for honour and recognition, grew larger with each new meeting, attracting the attention over the years of huge economic interests which eyed the monumental attention the games received worldwide. It was only a matter of time before the ideal of noble competition between men and women competing for an olive wreath and a place in history gave way to sleek managers, a multi billion dollar sports and media industry, and the idea of winning at all costs. With the advent of professional athletes and the coveted financial status of sports moguls that winners gained the prize became too big to withstand temptation. Ethics were eroded by money, and the loser lost all. High tech laboratories in Eastern Europe and California developed physically destructive drugs that gave athletes that extra hundredth of a second and allowed them to jump one or two centimetres higher than other competitors to win a Gold medal and the lucrative sponsorship deals that accompanied an Olympic win.

By the time the games returned to their home in Greece, in the 2004 Olympics, another factor had entered the equation - hundred million dollar Olympic security contracts. TV companies which had paid hundreds of millions of dollars for exclusive broadcasting rights were rightly concerned that a security incident could cause their viewers to change channels and make jumpy athletes leave the venue prematurely. The Athens Olympics hung in the balance when foreign governments accused Greece of harbouring terrorists and not doing enough to guarantee the protection of foreign athletes. Greece did indeed have one or two very small but deadly domestic terrorist groups. When they were arrested before the Olympics the 17th November terrorist group whose presence had cost the Greek government hundreds of millions of dollars in Olympic security contracts and years of training and retraining of police officers by foreign security services, it was found that 17th November were a group of 3 brothers, the sons of a priest, a real estate agent, a high school teacher and a disgruntled white haired senior citizen Trotskyist son of a Greek civil war revolutionary. The other group which was active in Greece was made up of a silver-haired balding mayor of an Aegean island and a few left wingers. New groups were born in the years that elapsed since the games, larger, better educated, causing more damage, and always a threat to their targets. Most have been arrested, but others are at large. However in terms of danger to the broader public they are of little significance compared to terrorist sharks such as Al- Kaida, Tim McVeigh, the Spanish train bombers, the London transport bombers, or the IRA who had devastated a whole city block in London and had planted bombs intentionally aimed at soft targets (who can forget the Tower of London bomb that killed and mutilated primary school children waiting in line excitedly to see the Crown Jewels?).

As a terrorist target Athens was inconsequential, despite the repeated directives and press attacks on the city over the years which made it sound something like civil war Beirut. London with the IRA, and New York with the 9/11 terrorist outrages proved that the police in those two cities could not protect their citizens or visiting tourists. Athens though paid the price, it contracted for the five hundred million dollar C4I surveillance system (which never worked) and the Games of 2004 passed without incident, as we all knew they would, security contract or no security contract. I remembered a notice I had seen at UC Berkeley in the sixties at Sproul Hall where there was a distinctive yellow and black sign over the main door designating the building basement as a nuclear bomb shelter. Over the sign a hippy has stuck a flier which said "Our Only Shelter is Peace". So it was with Greece. During the Athens Olympics we were protected by something far more effective than the hugely expensive security systems and personnel we were paying for - our foreign policy. We had invaded no one, had colonised no one, and had not waged aggressive wars to force other countries to buy drugs from us as had Britain with its two Opium Wars against the hapless Chinese who had lost Hong Kong into the bargain.

In 2004, we paid our dues to our security critics, in that most acceptable of ways - with money - and we reverted to our old undisciplined and occasionally murderous selves, but the fact remains that Athens, for tourists, is safe as were our Olympics in 2004.

Eight years later London has the privilege of hosting the Olympic Games. It is now the time for us Greeks to be concerned about the future of the Games that we gave the world. Commercialization brought drugs, something that threatens the games and its athletes more and more as national icons fall by the wayside as new tests are devised to reveal the use of previously untraceable performance enhancers. Just as dangerous for the future of the Games is the security question, not the financial bloodletting caused by signing the security contracts, but whether the host city can offer a safe venue to its hundreds of thousands of visitors and to competing athletes and their delegations.

London with its history of terrorist acts, which we can trace to the Sixties, coupled with the historic proclivity of successive British governments to wage incessant wars in exotic places for interests that are often so esoteric that even educated Britons often do not understand what national gain there will will be if the war is won (a doubtful outcome in places like Ireland, Iraq, Afghanistan, or off the horn of Africa) remains as a prime target for disgruntled and well trained belligerents who feel that their causes will advance in direct proportion to the civilian casualties they may bring about.

London cannot be safe as long as there are Irishmen who consider that a large segment of their country is still under British occupation. Their 700 year fight for a Free Ireland is not over yet, and this is certainly not encouraging for tourists who will be visiting London in 2012. Who can forget the Brighton bombing when Scotland Yard was incapable of protecting even the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who survived the hotel bob only by a fluke because she was awake at 3am and working in a colleague's room? Who can forget the bomb and the carnage wrought by the IRA on Rotten Row where a troop of elite mounted guards were torn to pieces with their horses a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace, and what of the City bomb which blew out the windows of skyscrapers in the very centre of London's financial heart? Can anyone forget the inability of MI6 and Scotland Yard to prevent a bomb being placed in broad daylight at the Cafe de Paris in Central London, a bomb intended for civilians and tourists? And all this was before Britain went to war with Al Kaida, a war that will in all likelihood still be going on when the Olympic Games begin in July of 2012, with all the associated risks to visiting tourists and foreing athletic delegations. Will Britain have won the war in Afghanistan or will she still be engaged in hostilities against the Taliban and their Muslim partners when the Games start?

It would be utopia to believe that the Taliban and Al Kaida have no sympathies or connections among pockets of extremist Muslim activists in Britain, a country where certain Muslim clerics have openly expressed their opposition to the British government and where British Muslims openly mock remembrance services for those British soldiers who lost their lives in past conflicts. Can we ignore the fact that Britain is a country where messages of racial hate have been heard at mosques, in London, right under the noses of the British police and the secret service? If we add the bus bombings to this and the spate of home grown terrorists being discovered by the day and news of foiled terrorist plots, then London is looking more scary by the day to us foreigners.

Scotland Yard can of course come to Greece or consult and pick the brains of our anti-terrorist officers and EYP, our state intelligence agency, on how to protect the Olympic Games, since Greece has a proven track record for Olympic Games safety. Greece though was dealing with a different type of terrorist, one who had a specific quarrel and went to some lengths to see that uninvolved, in their view, parties were not harmed. Britain's enemies are cut from a different cloth. They are people who consider their political goals will be advanced by random violence and mayhem. They are, it would seem from past experience, body count freaks to whom victim numbers is the yardstick of operational and political success.

Experience has shown that those who have a quarrel to pick with Great Britain see British culpability as a collective responsibility. If we add to the simmering British political cauldron several large cities with disgruntled inner city Muslim youth, widespread economic misery, unemployment, a pervasive senses of social and racial alienation and the dangerous glamour of belonging to a clandestine group with a clearly expressed and deadly message of hate levelled at the western world and specifically at Christian westerners who will be visiting London for the Olympics, and the chance of glorious martyrdom, then it would be naive for us not to be seriously concerned about the fate of the Olympic Games of 2012.

The concentration of perhaps 30,000 journalists and television crews in the British capital in 2012 may look like the opportunity of a lifetime for those wanting to create serious mischief when all the world's media will be in london looking for a story.

London's terrorist safety track record is unenviable.

There is nothing to suggest that with Britain having opened so many fronts on the military, political and religious fronts, and with the scant - in proportion to the threat- resources it has available, plus the fact that the Olympic Games are being held in a densely populated urban environment just a bus ride away from Muslim communities whose youth and visitors cannot all be monitored, then we are looking at a security nightmare.

If things do go wrong, something that Scotland Yard cannot assure us will not happen, then the London Olympics may be the last of the travelling road show commercialized Olympics that move from city to city every four years. It is difficult to see any city being willing and able to offer a peaceful venue without having to convert itself to be like a country under siege. It may be that the idea of the Olympic Games, as we Greeks envisaged them, as a venue for athletes from different towns to measure their athletic and mental prowess against one another, with wars suspended for the duration of the Games, may only be possible if the Olympics return permanently to their home of Ancient Olympia, as an amateur competition as they once were.

Ancient Olympia

It would seem that the Ancient Greeks knew that amateur athletics at a fixed venue was the only answer, and perhaps we should look at this solution for the future - to allow athletes to compete for the honour of winning, and to allow spectators to enjoy the spectacle seated on three thousand year old marble slabs in the proven safety of Greece and Ancient Olympia with not a policeman, paramilitary trooper, or anti-terrorist commando to be seen within a thousand kilometres of the cypress and poplar shaded stadia in the Peloponnese where the games were held in Ancient Greece. It is an option worth serious thought if we are to continue to identify the Olympic Games with athletics and spectacle, with the joy of winning, and not with whole cities under total electronic and visual surveillance in an atmosphere of Sixties South American banana republic paramilitary occupation.

The Olympic Games as we have come to know them may end in 2012, and it will be perhaps wise to look to the lessons that our forebears taught us about athletic competitions in order to allow the Olympics to regain their identity and innocence once again. The silent shady groves and athletic stadia of Ancient Olympia may be the answer to the question we may be asking already - what if London fails?

SAME FIVE FAMILIES CONTROLLING THE GREEK ECONOMY MOVE TO SECURE 5BN INTERNET and FRUIT MACHINE GAMBLING MARKET LICENCES

2011-04-16T12:30:00.012+03:00

Despite government efforts to break the closed shop situation in many sectors of the Greek economy, a situation that has excluded those without political influence from vital sectors of the economy such as energy, the media, mining, banking, public works and infrastructure projects, and defence, it seems business as usual for Greek citizens who read the names of those who are lining up to bid for a handful of internet gambling licences estimated to be worth 5 bn Euros a year. The closed shop situation has resulted in a few influential families controlling major sectors of the economy, excluding competition and damaging the economy by discouraging new investors from trying to enter what they see as a rigged game where only those with political connections are able to invest in the country.

A government MP revolt earlier in the week when the Minister of Economy attempted to introduce the new gambling bill to parliament allowing fruit machines to be in installed in tens of thousands of locations from cafes, to petrol stations and neighbourhood grocery shops for a moment pleased viewers who saw the parliamentarian revolt as an attempt to protect low and middle income citizens. Their relief at the apparent support in parliament was short lived when the names of those businessmen bidding for the new gambling licences were announced. Viewers saw that it was once again the same five families who have effectively controlled access to the core of the Greek economy and kept - in a manner more often seen in third world countries - the most lucrative sectors of the economy for themselves for the last 30-40 years.

It is indicative that when in 2010 there was discussion of opening up the electricity production sector to private investors the name of one of the above family heads came up in an article where the journalist wrote

"Mr X (note- one of the "Five") is annoyed that there has been interest by an outsider in securing one of the new electricity licences - it is well known that he is not prepared to let others into the electricity producing sector which he sees as his own."

Sadly the stranglehold on the economy will allow a minute and all powerful politico-economic oligarchy controlling publicly awarded contracts to continue to bid for, and secure sectors of the economy as the EU and the IMF agreement with Greece imposes the opening up of the economy. "Closed Shop" will continue its pernicious existence in Greece as long as the families which have made billions from their political connections and influence continue to gorge themselves on the dying body of the Greek economy, an economy painfully maintained by the productive efforts of ten million struggling Greek citizens who wonder how much money must still be given up to satisfy the personal greed of those families for whom billions and billions of Euros seem unable to satisfy their personal thirst for even more family riches.

The question is, and will be, what will be needed to finally slake the to-date unquenchable thirst for money of the Five Families (and two others which have not so far shown interest in the gambling licences) so that Greek and foreign investors, large and small, may finally have a chance to invest in, share, and boost the damaged economy for the benefit of all?

A STOLEN PIECE OF THE PARTHENON WAS RETURNED AT A CEREMONY AT THE NEW ACROPOLIS MUSEUM

2011-04-15T01:19:00.003+03:00

A Dutch tourist who stole a piece of the Parthenon Frieze more than 50 years ago handed it back anonymously via representatives to the Acropolis Museum at a ceremony held yesterday. The holder of the item did what his conscience bid him and it is to his credit that he agreed to return the stolen item to Athens. This could be a good example of principle and conscience for the British Museum director Mr MacGregor who insists that Greece does not have a claim for the return of dozens of looted sculptural masterpieces of the 5th BC which were removed from the Parthenon by Scotsman Lord Elgin two hundred years ago when Greece was under Ottoman occupation.

One can understand, but not sympathise with Mr MacGregor not wanting to return the priceless foreign items that give his museum and himself, as their temporary custodian, prestige, but one cannot condone the continued possession of the parts of a looted UNESCO monument which are still today in the British Museum. Just as Britain gave back foreign countries it subjugated by force, and had sold its inhabitants "legally" to the West Indies and to the American colonies, so it is time now for someone to tell the British Museum (which by the way is totally government supported and its board of 25 members appointed by the Prime Minister and by the Queen) that if one Dutch tourist can do the right thing, so can a Museum which claims it is the beacon of culture and civilisation.

good news and bad news from Greece

2011-04-15T00:37:00.003+03:00

The Good News from Greece, and there has not been much recently, was that the government finally passed the much needed law making possible the establishment of a new business in Hellas in 24 hrs. A much overdue law in a country where to open a small shop required more than 35 different certificates and permits, meaning that often the prospective shop owner was forced to back out of his investment after paying rents and running out of capital for retail premises for months while waiting for the approvals necessary to open the shop doors to the public. Minister Louka Katseli proudly described today how the government had linked various agencies, tax offices, chambers of commerce and other entities by computer allowing new businessmen to open up in just 24 hours. A breath of fresh air in the heavy Greek economic and investment climate.

The Bad News had to do with the ever stronger rumours and press reports of a possible restructuring of Greece's debt. The rumours have been consistently denied by the government and also by many opposition politicians. An example is former New Democracy Economy "Czar" George Alogoskoufis, a Karamanlis government Minister of National Economy who flatly denied the possibility of Greece being forced to restructure its debt when I interviewed him in 2010 for my upcoming book " Themis - An Investigation into Justice and Economics in Greece". Despite reassuring statements like this being made by members of the political establishment, by the Papandreou government and by Greek bankers, there are more voices by the day, especially overseas, which do not rule out such an eventuality. Time will show who is right.

More bad news has to do with effect of the crisis and the rise in crime of a sort not experienced in Greece before. Attacks on politicians are on the increase - today health minister Loverdos bodyguard violently repulsed a very angry young man who suddenly approached the minister in a manner that was deemed to have been threatening. Earlier this week a bus conductor tried to fine a man and a woman on a bus for not having paid for a ticket. The passenger took out a revolver and twice shot the conductor and ran off the bus before he could be stopped. The conductor who had struggled with the passenger was lucky not to have sustained serious injury.

Another effect of the crisis is a report today that 25% of drivers in Greece are driving their cars without renewing their automobile insurance, a situation which clearly will cause untold problems for those who are involved in accidents with the uninsured drivers.

Another statistic has come to add to the woes of the public. It is estimated that 170,000 people lost their jobs in the last year, with 25,000 in the last month alone, and that in a country of only 10 million citizens. Let us hope that the natural resistance of the Greek people and their historically honed survival skills will allow the country to get through the storm until things get better.

GREEK PARLIAMENT QUIETLY PASSES ANOTHER LAW TO OBSTRUCT ACCESS TO INFORMATION OF BANK ACOUNTS BY PROSECUTORS

2011-04-13T20:01:00.004+03:00

Just as public opinion was up in arms about reports of billions of Euros in bribes and siphoned public money being in politicians personal bank accounts and in offshore accounts, and just as several investigations by prosecutors were under way to determine who the bank accounts belonged to, Greek Parliament quietly passed a law in March forbidding investigating prosecutors from requesting information re suspect bank accounts.

The new law took away the power of prosecutors to make these request for information during criminal investigations and gave the right of requests for money laundering information exclusively to government agencies, all of which are managed and run by government appointees. This apparent ploy to keep politicians even further beyond the reach of the judiciary and prosecutors was made public on a television programme 4 days ago by a prosecutor, a Mr Sakkas, who had just retired in disgust at the way the political establishment had refused to go after fellow politicians accused of taking hundreds of millions of Euros in bribes and rake-offs. He pointed out the well known fact that politicians here had amended the constitution by the addition of Amendment 86 which gives almost total immunity to crooked ministers after the expiry of the parliamentary session after the one they served in - practically in about 3 years.

Sakkas insisted that politicians had made it impossible for him and other prosecutors and investigators to question or convict criminal millionaire politicians and brought as an example the March law taking away prosecutors' ability to request the opening of suspect accounts.

Journalist associates New Democracy Ex-Minister with allegations of 148million bank deposit in Greece

2011-04-11T20:04:00.008+03:00

There was another strange turn in the mystery surrounding the repeated rumours of an ex-Minister who news reports claim is connected to a 178Million Euro deposit in a Greek bank. The story has been titillating and infuriating the Greek public as newspapers and television channels have kept referring that the authorities have discovered a deposit of 178 million Euros belonging to a Greek politician connected to one of the three prominent Greek political families. While the name of the minister was not printed Mihalis Liapis, the nephew of the deceased ex President of Greece, Costantinos Karamanlis, issued a statement that said that his name had been libellously connected with the bank deposit and he threatened to sue anyone claiming that he was the insider with the illegal and undeclared money.

On April 4th, Spyros Karatsaferis, a veteran investigative reporter who had previously spoken several times about the deposit went onto Kontra TV and annunced that documents he had been shown to him indicated that it was Mihalis Liapis who was the account holder. Karatzaferis said that he did not know whether the documents the officials had shown him were genuine regarding the bank deposit at Alfa Bank in Greece, he did say that his own investigation at the bank found only 17,000E in Mr Liapis name but that officials had then told him that the money was under a "code".

They let him see, he said, a document where two Pasok serving government vice-ministers had personal accounts of 70 and 110 million Euros! He said that the officials kept their fingers over the names of the ministers and that he was convinced that there was a cover up being done regarding the whole story. Karatzaferis went on to say that from 4-5 sources he had heard allegations that Liapis had told the sources that if he was called regarding the account of the 148 (not 178) Million Euros, he would claim that this money was not his but had been given to him by his late uncle and ex-President of Greece Costantinos Karamanlis, and that he was only an administrator with instructions to give money to New Democracy if it was needed for the party. Karatzaferis said he had made Liapis name public in order to "protect" him.

As Greece sinks into a hole of massive public debt created by political mismanagement and corruption this story is indicative of the stories circulating in the debt ridden country where officials estimate that one in four businesses will close before the end of 2011, bringing distress and despair to hundreds of thousands of Greek households which had relied on their income on family financed and run businesses. All the while the political establishment, named by report after report coming from EU country investigators as receiving massive bribes, look down on the situation as annoyance builds up in ordinary citizens who refuse to accept that politicians have legislated immunity for themselves for crimes committed while in office. The Liapis episode, with its provocative allegations by Karatzaferis and several news editors, is certain to ignite more flames of resentment among the public and we will see more incidents of abuse of politicians who unwisely show themselves before an ever more hostile public.

There have been bloody assaults and verbal abuse of politicians, but it is likely that before very long, if more stories of ministers having hundreds of millions of Euros in their bank accounts are made public, then it we may expect to see the first serious injury or a political mortality in Greece.

Hush Order Regarding Former Minister's 178 Million Euro Swiss Bank Deposit

2011-03-20T12:36:00.010+02:00

(Citizens protesting outside Parliament in Athens against government corruption)

As Greece struggles on its knees to try and extricate itself from the consequences of massive political corruption and mismanagement of public finances more and more information is coming to the surface regarding phenomenal amounts of money stashed away in politicians' overseas private banking accounts or in offshore companies established by them.

While the Greek government makes a display of how determined it is to continue with reaping IMF imposed taxes on ordinary people, supporting the firing of hundreds of thousands of employees in the public and private sectors, savaging already meagre pensions for which worker contributions were made faithfully for 30 and 40 years by Greeks, there have been deeply disturbing reports in the media regarding a government cover-up of parliamentary colleagues who looted the nation by signing inflated value purchase contracts or by receiving bribes from companies like Siemens, the corrupt German multinational.

The most recent story to break concerns three government ministers, one current, and two former, who have been discovered by the Authority Against Money Laundering and by SDOE, the Greek Agency Against Financial Crime to have staggering amounts of illegal money in overseas accounts. The story broke recently on Extra TV News when journalists Yannis Papayannis and Spiros Karatzaferis revealed that the government had proof of the criminal funds. On 13/03/2011 Paron Newspaper of Athens ran a headline

"178.000.000 Euros were discovered in a deposit account belonging to a former minister of New Democracy!"

The article went on to say -

" Their greed has no limits. Just as their arrogance is without limit since they believe that no one will be found to investigate them. The Anti-Money Laundering Agency opened the accounts of a former Karamanlsi minsiter who was implicated in the Siemens scandal and fell upon a treasure horde. The gentleman in question was no pauper, he had deposits in banks totaling 178,000,000 Euros which of course he had never declared... what will follow will blacken his family name" added the newspaper, referring to the Extra TV report that the minister in question belonged to one of the three historic New Democracy party political dynasties. Since these are limited to only three clans- the Mitsotakis, Karamanlis and Kefaloyannis families -readers were left with a narrow field to choose from. The punitive press laws passed by Minister Evangelos Venizelos makes it almost impossible for the press to name corrupt politicians without fear of certain imprisonment and ruinous damage awards against the journalists who print the names of those politicians discovered with stolen money or bribes.

As Greece goes through a depression without precedent in post war years people have found themselves in a losing battle to survive and in just a year the whole of Greek society has been pushed back on the road to the 1950's where the middle class was almost non-existent. Daily threats by government ministers of the jailing of citizens who are unable to pay VAT, or taxes of even one Euro outstanding stand in provocative contrast to the immunity that has been given to crooked government ministers who find themselves protected by a Constitutional Statute of Limitations passed recently by a PASOK government which has allowed politician perpetrators of recent scandals to be off the hook, no matter how many hundreds of millions, or billions of Euros they may have been siphoned off to their personal accounts overseas or had deposited there by corrupt European corporations selling defence equipment or bidding for infrastructure contracts in Greece.

Greek citizens will answer without hesitation that fear is the message being sent by the government as it struggles to keep up with the ECB and IMF austerity measures demanded of the Greek populace. The same fear is not apparent in those who have robbed the state of its future and emptied its coffers with the proven cooperation of German and other EU corporations managing boards, and of course with the cooperation and complicity of EU and Swiss banks which know that a Greek minister client on a 2,000 Euro salary cannot show up in Banhofstrasse, or on Frankfurt's Mainzer Landstrasse and deposit 30, 20, 100 million Euros in a personal bank account.

The case of the former New Democraqcy minsiter with the 178,000 Euro bank deposit is particularly disturbing as is the report of the current government vice minister and a former government associate of his with amounts of 30-70 million Euros in their personal bank accounts because. This is because of the way they are being treated, preferentially, by the government.

According to journalist Spiros Karatzaferis and information revealed on Extra Channel Prime Minister George Papandreou's government HAS GIVEN INSTRUCTIONS TO STATE INVESTIGATORY AND TAX AUTHORITIES FOR THE IMMEDIATE SUSPENSION OF ALL INVESTIGATIONS CONCERNING POLITICIANS PROVED TO HAVE BEEN FOUND WITH TENS AND HUNDREDS Of MILLIONs IN THEIR ACCOUNTS!

Karatzaferis, who insists that there is proof in the hands of the investigatory authorities regarding the corrupt politicians secret accounts -and that one of these men belongs to a New Democracy political dynasty - should know since his brother is head of the parliamentary right wing party LAOS, which has among its MP's Korantis, the former head of EYP, the Greek secret service.

It is deeply disturbing for Greeks who are losing their jobs, their homes, their cars, their very way of life, to hear this media confirmation of what has been common knowledge all along, that politicians have looted the country and have the firm support and immunity extended to them by those in power even today when the average citizen is in a situation which is not of his own making. And there has not been one word from Mrs Merckel, or Mr Stros Kahn regarding the punishment of the culprits, but only of how to extract money more efficiently to pay the IMF and the ECB.

It is time for the government to immediately name and pursue those colleagues of theirs found to have hundreds of millions in stolen public money or from bribes in Swiss, EU and Lienchtenstein bank accounts.

Already, frustrated citizens have been demonstrating outside politicians homes in Athens with cries of "Thieves, Thieves" and "Bring Back the Money" and some on the street have started physically abusing politicians as happened three days ago in a taverna at the resort village of Kalyvia where the PASOK government vice president Theo Pagalos, a man of massive bodily girth and a razor sharp tongue who had admitted "we "ate" the money together", was trapped in the eaterie for two hours as a crowd of 500 angry local citizens shouted insults and the word "lamogio"(crook) at him. Two squads of riot police in full battle gear were forced to seal off the restaurant but were unable to prevent Pagalos from being doused with yoghurt, a classic Greek insult, as he tried to leave the taverna with his wife and some PASOK MP's. Citizens' anger and their abuse of the government representative can be seen by accessing the following link of the video of the incident as Pagalos carries on with his meal behind a wall of riot police.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWU1yvyV8oI

(if this does not take you directly to the video then click on the following from the selection that appears - Το γιαούρτωμα του Πάγκαλου στα Καλύβια (16.3.2011))

If PM George Papandreou does not take the situation regarding corrupt politicians immediately to hand and stop all suspicion that those who have stolen money from the people while governing them are being protected, then the situation will result in something far more serious than yoghurt or a bleeding face for guilty and innocent MP's alike, as happened when former minister Hajidakis of the ND Karamanlis government was recognised outside Parliament and immediately pursued and attacked by office workers on the street.

Papandreou must clean up parliament now, and instruct his ministers to lay off the daily threats against citizens who they expect to pay for the huge hole left by those who abused the faith that voters placed in them. There is no more time.

GMT GLOBAL MULTI-STRATEGY Fund of Funds, Kepler Corporate Markets and the story of a glass Building in Nyon, Switzerland

2011-02-20T18:09:00.012+02:00

UPDATE (24.2.2011) - SGFC MOVES NEXT DOOR TO A TRADITIONAL BUILDING- According to Swiss official documents Thierry Roussel's company SGFC moved their registered offices to the building next door on 16th February, 2011, to no 6a, Chemin du Joran (the white building on the right of the "Glass Box").

Just across the traffic roundabout from the Frey Used Car dealership facing an expanse of immaculately kept fields in the quiet town of Nyon on Lake Geneva is a three storey, blue, glass box office building at Chemin du Joran. Incongruous perhaps in relation to its more architecturally traditional neighbouring buildings the ultra modern office cube is home to a small group of companies which control hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of investments associated with some of the best known names in the world of international finance. The names of Kepler, SGFC, GMT Multi-Strategy Fund of Funds all have a connction with the building. We shall see how further on in this article.

The glass box building is the Geneva area headquarters of Kepler Capital Markets, an internationally known corporate finance service provider with offices in most of the major financial capitals. Of more interest perhaps is another professional tenant, tall, exceptionally good looking, 58 year old Thierry Roussel, the father of the Onassis heiress Athina Onassis de Miranda, who moved his operations – centred around his 1987 established investment and real estate company SGFC, (Société de Gestion Financière et Commerciale SA) - from the spreading 1,400 m2 Onassis mansion “Boislande” with its landscaped private estate in nearby rural Gingins to this purpose built building around 2003. It was then that Thierry Roussel took over the management of his daughter’s Onassis fortune after a heated series of civil and criminal court battles, fed to a frenzy by the international media, with the four Greek co-adminitrators of Athina’s fortune. The 4 Greeks were also in charge of the Alexander Onassis Foundations of Liechtenstein to which Athina, according to the Foundation charter signed by Christina Onassis, had the right of automatic accession to the presidency at the age of 21.

The accusations in 1997 by the Foundation and Roussel had led to multimillion dollar civil claims on both sides and criminal complaints being lodged in Greece. Worse for Thierry Roussel was a press conference that the Greek administrators gave in English and Greek to representatives of the world media, accusing Roussel of being an “incapable”, a man whose sole interest was in “putting his hands” on his daughter’s fortune and a person who had done nothing with his life except to lose money on business ventures overseas. There was no end to the invective spurted by former Onassis lawyer Stelios Papadimitriou, the president of the Onassis Foundation as he addressed the media that day and on other occasions. He accused Roussel of staging a conspiracy with Swiss judges to arrest the Greek patrimony administrators for alleged preparation of kidnapping of Athina, in order to get them out of the way of the management of Athina’s fortune. The media had a field day with the accusations, running front page stories quoting Papadimitriou deriding Roussel’s character and business capabilities and making a point about “his debts”. Similar and worse accusations by Papadimitriou were alleged to have been made when arrested Israeli security officers working for the administrators recounted stories in sworn depositions of what they said Stelios Papadimitriou had supposedly told them at a meeting they had at the Onassis Foundation offices in Athens.

Thierry Roussel fought a hard battle, spending weeks in Greek criminal courts where he was the accused party. Paris Match in a front page story during Roussel’s trial in Athens in 1998 had called the conflict “the battle for the Onassis fortune” and so it appeared to be. Roussel had countered with a series of countersuits and after hiring additional legal teams in Greece and organizing a world wide media defence he managed to win most of the cases. Of concern to him and to young Athina at the time was the criminal case brought by the Greek administrators and the Onassis foundation against him which resulted in the Athens Court of First Instance sentencing the financier/businessman to five years in prison. The sentence was not active pending his various appeals. Roussel managed to get the sentence reduced in the Appeals Court to three years imprisonment and the suspension of his civil rights for 36 months. When his High Court appeal was rejected he made use of his right under Greek law to convert the prison sentence to a fine which he paid promptly, having no further obligation to the Greek state.

The conflict with the Greeks was not over yet since they had instigated another criminal case against him and his press spokesman for alleged perjury and instigation to commit perjury. After 3 years the case was finally heard and unanimously dismissed by the three presiding judges, as was expected, by the Greek courts which ruled that the case brought by Papadimitriou personally was unfounded. Soon after remaining differences with the Roussel family and the administrators were settled out of court. This latest case had been one more phase in the Onassis fortune battle.

Thierry Roussel returned to his family and business activities in Switzerland, and his various real estate holdings which included the 59 bedroom Roussel family chateau at Sologne, property in Marbella and the exclusive Onassis building at 78, Avenue Foch in Paris. He still however had another major conflict to settle before being free of the past and the problems that his association with the Onassis family had brought him, along with, of course, its major benefits.

A new conflict broke out several months after his daughter, came into her fortune at the age of 18 in 2003. She was now with her new love, Brazilian Olympic horseman 31 year old Alvaro Affonso “Doda” de Miranda Neto, but some time afterwards objected to her hands being tied since her father had put her money, with good intentions no doubt, into a trust where he had appointed Banque Rothschild, Citicorp, and a couple of prestigious Swiss private banks as co-adinistrators of Athina’s Onassis fortune, with himself on the board. The bankers must have been delighted at Thierry’s decision to put them in co-charge of this large and famous fortune but before long the arrangement where Athina had to request specific sums to buy items which were beyond her monthly allowance caused friction, as did the reported cool relationship of Thierry with his new son-in-law to be. The matter soon became another Onassis cause-celebre in the media which voraciously reported every twist delighting in speculation on whether Athina would invite her father to her wedding in Brazil and whether he would attend if invited. He was not at the wedding when it took place.

The acrimony that followed the dispute resulted in both father and daughter hiring expensive legal counsel, before the matter was settled, with a reported 85 million USD settlement , according to Vanity Fair, given by Athena to her father for him to resign from the trust that was managing her fortune. It was rumoured that the various lawyers’ fees leading up to the settlement were around thirty million dollars, clearly not a happy situation for either father or daughter.

But for Thierry Roussel the Onassis related conflicts were now behind him and he could concentrate finally on his new project, the establishment of an important investment vehicle GMT – Fund of Funds designed to attract qualified investors.

Thierry Roussel formed the company and the funds after selecting several prestigious internationally active financial entities to support his ambitious new venture. His choice was inspired, and among those supporting the GMT Multi-Strategy Fund of Funds, as the new investment and money management vehicle was called, was Banque Privee Rothschild, a financial vehicle of the famed international banking family. It was a coup for Thierry Roussel. The Banque Privee Edmond de Rothschild Europe located at 20 Boulevard Emmanuel Servais in Luxembourg is described on the GMT website as being the custodian and administrative agent for the Roussel associated GMT Fund of Funds and the GMT address is given as c/o the Rothschild bank offices. For those interested in contacting GMT a telephone number is given for information which is in fact in Switzerland, at the Roussel offices in the glass block at Nyon where his private family investment company SGFC is located. There at the Nyon Roussel HQ a small team of traders, analysts, secretaries and other staff take care of business a few metres away from the Kepler Capital Markets offices.

The GMT website www.gmt-hedge.com is excessively discreet, something not unusual for financial institutions in that part of the world. For those who do not have a password the website there is no senior staff list or management personnel photos available, unlike the site of their neighbour Kepler Corporate Finance which has their senior staff listed on the company website, with their photos and positions, as do thousands of financial services companies around the world. One can see the Kepler team at http://www.keplercapitalmarkets.com/Categories/CorporateFinance/CorporateFinanceEnglishHome.aspx

Thierry Roussel, after all the difficulties he experienced and overcame in Greece and with the family quarrel now settled, must be happy with the way things have turned out for him and his investors with his brainchild creation of GMT GLOBAL MULTI-STRATEGY FND OF FUNDS, S.C.A, SICAV-SIF.

(The writer of this article is the former press representative of Thierry Roussel and the author of the book 'Athina Onassis dans l'oeil du Cyclone' (Editions Favre). The book on Athina Onassis and Thierry Roussel is also available in Portuguese (Alvez) and in Greek "Αθηνά, στο Μάτι του Κυκλώνα"(Periplus). The book has been presented live on CNN. )

Panic at the Greek Ministry of Transport caused by the "I won't Pay, I won't Pay" movement

2011-02-15T16:39:00.005+02:00

Strikes are no new phenomenon in Greece. But the country generally manages to get over them after a few days of confrontation and disruption of city centre traffic. However the IMF and ECB imposed austerity measures demanding daily increases of taxes, new taxes, cutting back of salaries and benefits, to pay for the crisis generated by a massive looting of the economy and mismanagement in the past have given rise to a new grass roots movement which has the government and others worried. What began as an internet based campaign called "I won't pay, I won't pay" with few followers has swollen its ranks of support and has moved into an activist action campaign that has the government seriously worried. The Transport Minister, Mihalis Reppas has taken contradictory positions and become more and more threatening by the day to those who are taking action. But what is it all about? Greeks, seeing their salaries reduced, their summer holiday payments quashed and a spate of new increases across the board at the same time that thousands of citizens have lost their jobs, decided enough was enough when the government raised toll rates and increased toll stations on public highways. Citizens who found themselves forced to pay freeway tolls on roads that had not been completed and often did not even have a dividing safety barrier said NO, and refused to pay. Activists manned the road toll stations and encouraged drivers to raise the toll bars and drive through without paying. They claim that it is illegal to charge for services that are not being provided. The government through Reppas countered that the new highways, almost all given to the three consortia who seem to be monopolising most major public works projects, had been granted to the contractors allowing them to charge tolls in order to finance the roads that they had undertaken to build. The contractors, shaken by what has become a country wide movement, demanded that the governemnt put a stop to the citizen activists and to the thousands of drivers who raise the barriers and refuse to pay, claiming the banks financing the projects were backing off and not giving them funds. Reppas responded to the movement by announcing that the "freeloaders" as he called them were breaking the law and the government wrote a bill to make it a jailable offence to refuse to pay the 2.5Euro private car charge on the unfinished highways.

There has been a huge outcry against this with opposition members of parliament saying that while the Greek state, via a recently issued legal decision, declared that those ministers and MP's involved in the billion Euro Siemens bribery and contract overcharging scandal had immunity under the statute of limitations clause which applies to parliamentarians only, the government was now legislating to jail those minnows who refuse to pay the 2.5Euro toll cost. This understandably has gone down badly and an already injured populace, called on to fill the gaps left by the billions of Euros in bribes siphoned out of the country by corrupt public officials have come out in support of the new movement, claiming that it is the politicians and ministers, many of whom never practiced a profession or worked independently, who are the freeloaders, with their state provided Mercedes, free phones, publicly financed office staff, etc. The more Reppas becomes threatening the more there is a danger that the Ghandi-like non-cooperation movement will spread to other forms of transport and perhaps - a nightmare scenario to the beleaguered government - to a generalised citizens' refusal to pay taxes or public service bills.

While making his belligerent claims Reppas has offered to reduce tolls on highways that are under construction, which still does not address the question of the legality of charging anything, reduced or not, for a service that is not being offered, in this case, modern highways with proper divisions between going and coming traffic, completed road surfaces, proper access and exits, lighting, signage, and accepted safety specifications for the protection of the drivers. Already the cauldron is boiling and Mr Reppas and his contractors would perhaps be wise to look at this issue immediately before "I won't pay" becomes the motto and civil disobedience becomes the forerunner of worse things just as the Mediterranean basin is showing its first signs of cracking.

The Mantheakis Post - Lethal Bomb Blast in the Greek Minister of Security's Office indicates an Inside Job

2010-06-24T22:59:00.005+03:00

Early this evening a bomb concealed in a package went off in the hands of an aide of the Greek Minister for the Protection of The Citizen, Michalis Chrisohoides, in the minister's seventh floor office at the high security Katechaki Street security services skyscraper, a building set in a walled and fortified compound where the security ministry, the Greek secret service, EYP and other police agencies are located. What is a mystery is how the package reached the seventh floor without passing the rigorous series of visual and x-ray checks- first at the entrance to the compound, then at the ground floor of the somewhat ominous olive-green office high rise resembling security state security HQ's of former soviet states, and finally at the entrance to the minister's suite of offices on the seventh floor. The whole compound and its installations are bristling with security cameras and armed guards, something which makes the passage of the bomb to the desk of the minister's long time confidant and personal aide, Police Chief Vasilakis, a mystery.

When Vasilakis attempted to open the package, just a few feet from where Minister Chrisohoides was sitting, the home-made device exploded, killing Vasilakis, while the others in the office were unharmed.

The bomb explosion caused understandable consternation, since this came at the beginning of the tourist season on the back of a much publicised increase in security ordered by Chrisohoides who had recently ordered dozens of police motorcycle riders to race around the capital in groups of seven or eight, two up, with blue lights flashing, to give citizens the impression of a strong police presence. Today's incident has caused extreme embarrassment, owing to the fact that the bomb reached the very heart of the ministry without being intercepted. Further, it was the first time that terrorists had not informed the authorities of a bomb about to go off, something they normally do in Greece in order to avoid the loss of human life. It is clear that the intent was to take human life, as it did, and this raised the level of conflict between the state and its opponents to a new level.

The examination of security camera tapes will show who delivered the package with the bomb, but even so the person who carried the bomb must have been aware of the presence of cameras. This leads to the worst scenario - that this murder was an inside job. The next 48 hours will help clarify what in fact happened and which domestic terrorist group will claim responsibility for the explosion.

United States refuses to give corporate information to a Greek Parliamentary Commission investigating ministerial corruption

2010-06-20T17:14:00.018+03:00

Former Pasok Minister Akis Tsohatzopoulos

Last week the refusal of US government authorities to respond to a request for information by a Greek Parliamentary Commission investigating ministerial corruption seemed destined to stall the Greek government's search as to who was the real owner of a US registered the company, and whether this corporation was associated with a former Greek defence minister, Akis Tsohatzopoulos, who had signed numerous defense contracts with US and NATO arms suppliers. The Greek parliamentarians and prosecutors wanted information from the US authorities regarding the US registered company NOBILIS which investigators and the Greek parliamentary commission had associated with - among other deals- the minister's young wife's purchase last month of a luxury mansion property on hyper-exclusive Dionysiou Areopagitou Street. Tsohatzopoulos and his wife had lived there for several years, claiming that they did not own the building and used as proof contracts showing that the property belonged to the offshore US company whose real owner US authorities refuse to divulge. information.

Dionysiou Areopagitou Avenue, where the controversial mansion is located, is an exclusive and popular marble-lined pedestrian walk running along the southern boundary of the Acropolis. In recent years its stunning view of the Parthenon and an influx of celebrities, shipowners and other millionares seeking to buy one of the handful of new-Classical properties along the avenue has made it the most expensive stretch of real estate in the Greek capital. The desirability of the location has however also attracted a new, more controversial breed of buyer - well-heeled Greek politicians, who can, somehow, afford to buy select properties on the street when one comes on the market.

Recently the Greek press and the investigatory authorities started a multi-pronged investigation into the circumstances surrounding the aging Pasok socialist party former minister of defence and party secretary Akis Tsohatzopopulos. The rash of accusations against 70+ year old Tsohatzopoulos and the verbal and media attacks on him and his latest, thirty-something, wife Viki Stamatis has been provoked by the Onassis-like lifestyle of the couple. Reports regarding their real estate holdings has stirred up a storm of public indignation and calls for the immediate arraignment of the ex-minister and confiscation of his properties, most of which, according to the Greek media, appear to belong to offshore companies.

Tzohatzopoulos and his young wife have come a long way from humble beginnings to a stunningly opulent lifestyle. However was this Dynasty-like provocative lifestyle that caused the couple to bring down the roof on themselves. Tsohatzopoulos, who started life selling sausages in his father's store in Salonica rose to political prominence as the sidekick of the late Pasok founder and former Prime Minsiter Andreas Papandreou. After Pasok came to power the pliant and affable Tsohatzopoulos found himself in a number of senior government posts in the Papandreou governments. He was considered the perfect wing man for the gifted and often emotional Papandreou. Wicked urban legend has it that whenever Papandreou asked Tsohatzopoulos what time it was, Tsohatzopopulos would reply

"Whatever time you say it is, Mr Prime Minister".

Tsohatzopoulos rode the wave of political power, learning to enjoy the material benefits that can accompany political office. He became known for his bespoke tailored suits, his expensive silk ties and his love of gourmet exclusive restaurants and five star hotels, such as the Grand Resort Lagonissi where Tsohatzopoulos reportedly spent weekends and summers in an exclusive luxury seaside bungalow with its own pool, gym and private garden costing several thousand euros per day. Next door neighbours in the seaside resort hotel complex were rulers from the Emirates, billionaire shipowners, European heirs and heiresses like Athina Onassis and stars of the magnitude of Leonardo di Caprio. Not bad for a boy who had sold sausages. All this was a huge change from the days when he had arrived in Athens wearing a trademark brown suit with black stripes soon after the fall of the military dictatorship in 1974.

Tsohatzopoulsos had a theatrical manner of speaking and for some it was difficult to understand the politically peppered statements that made him a popular target for Greek TV satirists.

Greeks are notoriously tolerant of others foibles and of unusual lifestyles, however the beginning of the end of the minister's political career, and of more, perhaps, was when he began an affair with an unknown-to-the-public woman nearly forty years his junior. Her name was Viki Stamati, a stern looking young brunette with large eyes, a girl who had grown up in a less than modest circumstances in a village where her mother herded goats for a living and her father worked as a building worker. Despite the disadvantage of starting life in such an impoverished background she managed to make her way steadily up the social ladder. Her big boost came when she met the aging minister, who after 3 years or so dumped his German wife of many years,Gudrun, to be with his new love from the countryside. Before long stories of consumer profligacy and a provocative lifestyle started circulating about the couple. Her shopping sprees were hinted at, as was her treatement of the police guards assigned to her minister husband. She was said to look on her husband's police bodyguards like servants, sending them on errands, and generally assuming the airs of a social station way above that in which she had been born into.

Tsohatzopoulos moved his young lover to possibly the most expensive apartment in Athens on the corner of Vassilis Sofias Avenue that leads past a row of grand Neoclassical embassy mansions to Constitution Square and to the Greek Parliament building.

In Greece things were starting to change though as the country entered a downward spiral of economic decline, but the problems of the masses seemed unable to penetrate the ever more glamorous ivory tower lifestyle of the minister and his village-born lover. The decisive blow came when the press released photographs of the May-December wedding of the white haired Tsohatzopoulos and his young, immaculately groomed and dressed bride. The photos were taken at the Greek Orthodox church in Paris where the French millionaire playboy and heir to the Roussel pharmaceutical fortune, Thierry Roussel, had married Christina Onassis, the only daughter of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. The articles about the Tsohatzopoulos-Stamati wedding went on to describe the gilded reception that followed at the five star Four Seasons Georges V Hotel, perhaps the most exclusive and expensive venue in the French capital. Reports about the cost of the fabled wedding, possibly exaggerated, spoke of a 2.5 million dollar price tag for the 18 guests who attended the event. Several others who had been invited had stayed away, sensibly as it turned out, suspecting the furore that would follow when the Hollywood- style wedding reception's details would be leaked to the public. For the enamoured Tsohatzopoulos, living on a government salary of perhaps 6,000 dollars a month, it was political faux pas of such magnitude that not even he could have suspected what was to follow his choice of holding the wedding in Paris. In a country like Greece where belts were tightening and people were finding it difficult to survive and to economically protect their children and their future there was a political backlash fueled by enraged public opinion. Tsohatzopoulos, who once missed becoming prime minister by one vote, saw his Salonica voter base turn its back on him when the next national election took place in 2007. The glamorous socialist politician with a long history with Pasok was unable to muster the minimum votes needed to get back into parliament in what had always been a safe seat for him. His supporters now ostracised him for his actions but even this was not enough to focus his judgement enough to prevent him making more, and possible terminally destructive, decisions while carrying on his relationship with his new wife.

Ignoring press and public criticism and unable to see the reality of the sea change in public attitude that had taken place around him and throughout the country Tsohatzopoulos and his family now associated themselves with the purchases of a series of exclusive luxury apartments and other real estate. As if this was not enough he moved his young wife to Dionisiou Areopagitou street, above which the Parthenon, literally a hundred metres in front of the Tsohatzopoulos balcony, stands as a silent sentinel over a city that has seen it all. The ancient monument and has seen politicians and kings, emperors and ministers rise and fall. Many have passed into oblivion as the tide of history swept away those who thought that society would be ever forgiving and that riches and vanity would be an unbreachable wall protecting them from the rest of the world.

But, as so often happens, Viki Stamati and her elderly former minister husband had provoked the public with their lifestyle and new found riches one time to many. The purchase of the Acropolis mansion apartment by Tsohatzopoulos' wife had been an ill-timed move. With the collapse of the Greek economy due to political mismanagement and graft, the Greek public had finally had enough, the government was looking for someone to blame and the opposition were happy to have an easy target, while the media loved the mix of aging lover/billionaire lifestyle and a young wife with airs who had come from what was, socially, nowhere. For the Tsohatzopoulos couple the fairytale turned into a Grimm's horror tale.

While Greeks were losing their jobs by the tens of thousands, pensions were being cut on instructions of the IMF and the European Central bank, and young people with university degrees from Greece and overseas were seeing their years of family sacrifice and personal effort turn to ashes, a political caste of plutocrats came to top the traditional businessmen establishement. The politicians/plutocrats now had big money and they flaunted it. The tide of anger that came like a tsunami to wash over the minister's Parthenon area mansion in May was of such proportions that the formerly debonair Tsohatzopoulos (once called "Beau Brummel" for his looks and sartorial flair) was now turned into a mere and pathetic shadow of his former self. As he stood in front of a pressing group of noisy television reporters outside his residence Tsohatzopoulos,thin, deeply creased and barely audible, accused former colleagues and unnamed enemies of conspiring against him and wishing for his personal and political destruction, claiming meldodramatically that his and his family's physical existence were also in danger.

For the first time in years Tsohatzopoulos seemed to have his finger on the pulse of public opinion. For the public, which has never seen a Greek politicians jailed nor properties of corrupt public figures confiscated, the Tsohatsopouolos story seemed, with the refusal of the American government to say who owned Nobilis corporation, doomed to end up as a fiasco for the Greek investigatory authorities. The law of ministerial immunity and the protection given to politicians by the recent Venizelos amendment to the constitution had also made the work of the investigating prosecutors almost impossible, even if they could prove wrongdoing or illegal enrichment on behalf of the minister and his wife, as the media claim.

To add to Tsohatzopoulos' troubles the ruling Pasok party's Transparency Committee suspended Tsohatzopolulos from the party until an investigation is completed regarding the former minister's finances. Worse still, Tsohatzopoulos' daughter Areti was reported by a major Greek newspaper as being under investigation for 8 million Euros allegedly found in her personal bank account. She denied the article's claim in statements she made to the press, but it was clear that the situation is now very difficult for the former minister and his family since, as inevitably happens in cases like this, myth starts to be confused with the truth.

One cannot guarantee that the patience of the Greek public has not snapped and that people, as one hears more and more often, now want more than a conviction or confiscation of fortunes.The call for blood, literally, is in the air and the minister seems to have sensed it, as one could see by his obvious fright when he made his statement to the press in front of his Acropolis property. More tellingly, a large bruise - ill-concealed by pale concealer makeup- stretching from Tsohatzopoulos' eye, across his cheek to his ear, and down to his jaw. may have been proof that Greek citizens were finally taking matters into their own hands regarding those they believe, justly or unjustly, to have looted the state and brought about the country's financial misery. Conflicting press reports that the bruise on Tsohatzopoulos left cheek was the result of him bumping into a metal door, and a newer report that he had struck himself involuntarily as a result of his anger at what was written in the papers about him (!) should be taken with a large pinch of Saronic Gulf salt. The socialist millionaire politician's face looks as if it had received a very angry punch. Had some vigilante citizen taken matters into his or her own hands?

Conclusion- The future does not bode well for politicians who flaunted new yachts, luxury mansions with tennis pools, basketball courts, servants quarters, and whose wives and children have been photographed on luxury brand boutique shopping sprees, attended by servants and chauffeurs. Nor is this indeed a secure time for the wives and children of neo-millionaire Greek politicians living like the Tsarist Russian aristocrats of the last century. For the Greek political plutocrats and their families the electronic calendars in their teak-lined luxury airconditioned yachts and on the jewelled faces of their platinum Piaget, red gold Mughler, and diamond-encrusted Rolex watches should perhaps be turned back to read "September, 1917". For the US authorities and corporations who worked closely, and in partnership with (as did Siemens) corrupt figures of the political establishment, it is time to do the decent thing and come clean by helping Greece with any information they have regarding US and other offshore corporations that are being investigated by our government for Greek ministerial money laundering. The government wants to find out where the People's money has gone and so does the public. It will be a wise and welcome step for the Obama administration to help, and it could be a significant step in the process of saving Greece from a descent into civil unrest which could follow if the frustration level of middle class and working Greeks goes a millimetre higher. Until the situation is cleared up satisfactorily it is inevitable that accusations will be levelled by the media at politicians, who like Tsohatzopoulos, may have no evidence of wrongdoing produced against them further than a prominent lifestyle. It will be well to clear the air so that those who are in fact guilty may be exposed and the innocent cleared of blame and suspicion.

The word REVOLUTION, to describe the turn of events in this ancient land, may be just around the corner after many, many decades. It will truly be a pity if Greece is reduced to this.

Founding Onassis Foundation Member's Athens Funeral Brings Back Memories of the Bitter Legal Struggle for Control of Athina Onassis Inheritance

2010-06-08T15:15:00.010+03:00

Athina Onassis Scorpios Island

Shortly after 5 pm yesterday afternoon a funeral congregation of mainly elderly mourners walked among the century old cypress trees and flowering oleanders along a narrow path between white marble tombs and small mausoleums bearing the names of once prominent Athenian citizens and politicians. The mourners accompanied a coffin bearing the body of Apostolos Zabellas, a former Onassis employee and executive, to his last resting place at the Athens First Cemetary. Zabellas, 83, who had once been chief accountant for Aristotle Onassis Olympic Airways during its heyday had, after the death of the Greek shipping tycoon, found himself appointed to the newly formed Alexander Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. The Foundation had been created by the tycoon's daughter Christina Onassis Roussel and other family members according to the stipulations of the will of Onassis, who wanted the money that would have gone to his dead son and heir Alexander, to be used for the creation of a foundation which would become prestigious and, most famously, would create international prizes on the model of the Nobel Prizes.

A series of premature deaths in the Onassis family members appointed to the board of the Foundation, something Onassis could not have foreseen, allowed the foundation to be gradually taken over and controlled by a group of former Olympic executives led by one of Onassis many lawyers, Stelios Papadimitriou (who famously described himself, during an interview in 1988 with Eleftherotypia newspaper journalist Georgia Linardou, as "having a superiority complex").

Papadimitriou, together with Olympic pilot Pavlos Ioannides, accountant Apostolos Zabellas, and another Onassis lawyer - Gavrielides - worked closely together to run the Onassis Foundation, which was presided over by Onassis daughter Christina. Christina did well as head of the Foundation and was credited for introducing the idea and creating the state-of-the-art Onassis Heart Surgery Clinic in Athens, the opening of which she was not to live to see since her life was snuffed out one night in Buenos Aires when she was just 38, under circumstances which to this day have never been satisfactorily explained.

The immediate aftermath was that a will which bore her handwriting appointed her husband Thierry Roussel and the four members of the Onassis Foundation, Zabellas, Papadimitriou, Gavrielides and Ioannides, as co-adminsitrators of her fortune. Christina left almost everything, including the fabled private Onassis island of Scorpios (photo above), to her only daughter and last Onassis family survivor, 3 year old Athina. There was a provision for a yearly stipend of 1,240,000 USD for Thierry Roussel, and rather surprisingly a whopping 2,000,000 dollars each to the Papadimitriou group of the Onassis Foundation, to whom Onassis himself had left only small amounts in his will.

The death of Christina Onassis signalled the beginning of what was to become perhaps the greatest legal struggle over any fortune of the 20 th century. More than 75 court cases in multiple jurisdictions over a course of more than ten years took place with names of plaintiffs and defendants constantly swapping. On the one side were the 4 Onassis Foundation members, with Papadimitriou as the new president of the massively wealthy foundation, and the same four members as members of the administrative board of the minor Athina Onassis patrimony, while on the other side was the heiress's father, Frenchman Thierry Roussel and the heiress herself, who found herself being sued by the very people who had benefited greatly from their association with her grandfather and her mother. It was these people who were now in charge of her own inheritance until her coming of age.

Zabellas was the lowest key of the players, always present during the court cases, laconic in his statements, but a moving force in the controversial cases against the family that had been his benefactors. The group, which came to be known by the international press as the "Four Greeks" moved to exclude Athina's father from the management board of his daughters fortune, and after a strange story in Switzerland, involving former Mossad agents who initially were thought to have been planning the kidnap, and worse, of the heiress and actions against her father, a story resulting in an international investigation by multiple police authorities and the arrests of the Israeli agents, and several other actions,(the case was closed by Geneva prosecutor Crochet who ruled that nothing was amiss), the Swiss authorities dissolved the board appointed by Christina in her will - an almost unprecedented usurpation of such a prominent last will - and gave the management of the patrimony to the Lausanne office of KPMG, the international auditors firm.

This was to be a pivotal event as it meant that half the Onassis fortune was taken away from the control of the "Three Greeks"* and passed to Athina herself upon her coming of age on January 29th of 2003. (*Gavrielides had removed himself from the fray after an amicable settlement of differences between the heiress, her father and himself, a deal brokered by Alexis Mantheakis, our blog editor, who was at that time press spokesman and advisor to the heiress's father, Thierry Roussel).

The "Three Greeks" with their sons, who had also joined the Foundation board and were working for the Foundation businesses, now controlled the Onassis Foundations, in the absence of an Onassis adult heir (the Deed of Charter of the the Alexander Onassis Foundations which had been signed by Christina Onassis and also by Stelios Papadimitriou clearly stipulated in section 14 that there would always be an Onassis family president, on condition that the heir was 1) over 21, and 2) willing, and that the heir would become president 3) "without the need of election". Another condition was that the board did not have the right to change the articles referring to the presidency.

The "Three Greeks" and the board of the Foundation, in contravention of the Deed of Charter went ahead at a board meeting in Lausanne and altered the deed's articles, excluding the Onassis descendants from automatically ascending to the presidency of the family- funded foundation. Athina Onassis was out, for the moment. Until today there has been little made known as to whether she will go ahead one day and line up her fortune and her legal guns in order to prepare to assail the Lichtenstein- domiciled Alexander Onassis Foundations, in order to reclaim what the Deed of Charter says belongs to the Onassis family heirs.

To date Athina (or more correctly, Athena) has appeared happy to occupy herself with her horses and with organising the very successful Athina Onassis Equestrian Games. She alos helps run A+D Horses, a company which she owns with her Brazilian twice- Olympic equestrian champion, Alfonso Alvaro "Doda" de Miranda Neto.

Yesterday's funeral left only one of the original "Three Greeks" alive - sprightly tweeded Pavlos Ioannides, now well into his eighties. His son Ioannis together with Stelios Papadimitriou's son Andonis now run the foundation and its billion dollar business interests with Andoni Papadimitriou as the President of the Onassis Foundation. Athina for her part seems happy to lead a quiet life and to stay in command of her own inherited fortune.

With the passing of Zabellas, whose own son left the Foundation board and businesses after a reputed acrimonious parting with the other "Three Greeks' " sons, the situation is that the two sides of the well documented dispute each control half of the Onassis legacy.

Whether the strenuous years in court for the litigants and the dozens of civil and criminal court cases, with their accompanying battles waged on a public stage witnessed by the world's media, was worth it, for Pavlos Zabellas and Stelios Papadimitriou, both of whose lives ended in difficult medical circumstances, is a question which only they could have answered.

One thing is for sure, it is Athina Onassis who has survived the struggle, as has her father Thierry Roussel, and they are both incontrovertibly able today to enjoy peaceful lives away from the former daily stress of a harassing and massively expensive conflict for control of the Onassis money and the institutions it spawned. Perhaps money can buy happiness in the end, afterall.

The Mantheakis Post - The IMF and the EU take over Greece's Finances as EU Banks Hide Billions in Laundered Greek Political Euro Deposits

2010-04-27T21:20:00.007+03:00

When a former New Democracy Speaker of Parliament ,Mrs Benaki, said that Greece would soon lose some of its national independence there was an angry reaction from some of her parliamentary colleagues. Mrs Benaki did not run in the national election of 2009 and is perhaps happy not to be a member of the Greek government which today is in the process of having to play host to three members of the IMF as they make last minute adjustments to the way the Greek economy must be run. Greece has unfortunately ceded control of her economy to Brussels and the IMF - it is just the details of the agreement that are being formalised now in Athens as Greece struggles to save itself from bankruptcy brought about by monumental corruption, over-borrowing, and a feeling that the sun will always shine on Hellas.

The last two months (in which our blog has been a silent witness to the economic and political humiliation of Greece) have been interspersed by domestic terrorist attacks, consistent violations of Greek airspace by Turkish military planes and territorial waters by Turkish navy vessels, a surge of publicity concerning several corruption scandals (Siemens, the Vatopaidi Monastery affair, Daimler, etc), and above all daily debates and arguments concerning the fate of Greece economically. Today the dust is settling and even a casual observer can see that things are clearer, though far worse than even the most pessimistic Greek could have imagined a year ago.

Our EU partners, spurred on by a heavy booted Angela Merckel of Germany have imposed a first round of austerity measures on Greece, and today a second round is being demanded by the German Chancellor in order to approve an EU led bailout. The uncertainty caused by the situation has driven the cost of borrowing for the Greek government to unprecedented levels, and there are even predictions that borrowing costs may rise to 20% within a year.

Worse still are rumours that today (April 27th) in a meeting of the three IMF officials with M.P.s and economists there was discussion of a further round of punitive economic measures which include the reduction of pensions by 30%. If one adds this to the rumoured firing of 200,000 civil servants - something that will affect at least a million family members (among a population of 9 million Greeks) who will be left without any source of income it is almost a certainty that Greek society as we have known it is about to change into something we have not envisaged or been prepared for.

One can say that corruption is the responsibility of the Greeks, as the Germans insist, but was it not German companies (surely not without the knowledge or participation of German politicians) which added billions of Euros onto the price of goods they sold to Greece in order to distribute bribes. When a German politician said that Greeks were spending money profligately and damaging the EU, a Greek replied that perhaps this was true but that the German economy was the beneficiary, since hundreds of thousands of Mercedes, BMW's, VW's, and millions of Siemens and Gaggenau appliances had been bought by Greeks, something that had boosted employment in Germany, filled Mrs Merckel's national coffers with Greek-earned Euros and helped Germany maintain the prosperity which it was using as a stick to beat Greece with. This is not to mention the fact that thousands of shops have closed their doors as LIDL, PRAKTIKER and other German retail chains have come into Greece to siphon off a considerable portion of Greek family wages out of the country, while selling goods to Greek consumers that in the rest of the EU are up to 35% cheaper. The result is a weakening of domestic budgets and the closure of thousands of small family run retail shops which cannot compete with the massive funding and marketing strategies of the German retail chains. A little more respect by Mrs Merckel would be in order, so that people in Greece do not go a little deeper and start analysing Germany in a historic perspective viz a viz Greece, and what Germany has cost Greece in misery, human lives and the almost total destruction of its prewar infrastructure not to mention a mandatory war time loan imposed on a defeated Greece, a loan which was never repaid.

Yes, let us put crooked politicians in jail, Mrs Merckel - in BOTH countries. Let us put our economic balance of payments in order, we all want that. But first tell the Munich prosecutor and your judiciary to make public all the names of those Greek politicians and military officers that Siemens and other German conglomerates admitted to having routinely bribed with hundreds of millions of Euros to get an inside track on our public tenders for major infrastructure and military contracts. Bribes which were added onto the cost of the projects and which were therefore paid for by those very Greek taxpayers whom Mrs Merckel accuses of not paying enough in taxes and contributions to the Greek state treasury. We want that money back in our country Ms Merckel, and it is up to you to return it before we start any austerity measures.

Let us therefore have Mrs Merckel, Mr Brown and other EU leaders give us a list of all Greek politicians illegal billions which are today in Swiss, German, French, British and British Dependency banks.

Give us back the looted billions which have made your banking systems healthy and allow us once again to boost our economy, expand our employment, finance our educational system and pay our citizens a decent wage, when millions of them had to have second, and even third, jobs in order to survive in a country that was being systematically milked of its wealth and currency base by an increasingly corrupt partnership of local politicians and their EU partners.

Bring back the stolen billions and we will put our own house in order without the help of Mrs Merckel, the ECB or the IMF, and we will do it now! Start then by telling us how many hundreds of billions of Greek Euros are in your EU banks and give us the names of the account holders, and we will do the rest.

The Mantheakis Post - The Greek Economic Crisis: Rooted in The Mobutu Syndrome

2010-02-27T23:30:00.008+02:00

Just as representatives of the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund were preparing to leave Greece where they had come to make sure this week that an even heavier tax burden and reduction of wages, as well as other austerity measures, be added to the already intolerable weight on the shoulders of the average Greek citizen, the Greek government announced that it would be confiscating 100,000 homes. The reason - struggling property owners had not paid one of the many taxes imposed on their houses and other properties in the last two years. For a nation of citizens victimised by profligate government spending, rampant political corruption and the irresponsible borrowing policies of national governments and municipal authorities over the last 30 years this announcement referring to the confiscation of 100,000 homes was the latest of a series of government measures destined to pacify EU regulators.

In an economic crisis of the massive proportion of the one which is now sweeping across Greece the populace logically were looking to the government for support and for measures which would help citizens and the country out of the deepening economic abyss. Instead of receiving help, as the Greek banks (privately owned enterprises) got last year when €28 billion was given to them by the government, citizens found themselves threatened now by the government and faced with the ultimate humiliation - that of losing their homes and finding themselves and their families out on the streets. And yet with all the discussions regarding austerity measures there has not been ONE word spoken by the government, the IMF or the ECB about paying off Greece’s debts from a mountain of ready cash belonging to Greeks – cash which could be made available for this purpose if the EU and the US wanted a fair resolution to our debt crisis.

The Catch?

The money mountain is made up of bribes and money siphoned off from public coffers by ministers and sent abroad. This situation and the estimated billions of Euros that have been drained from the Greek economy - resulting in massive cost increases of defence, industrial and public works projects to accommodate political commissions - is common knowledge, verified by Transparency International, reported on by the Greek and foreign media, and is today an integral part of current Greek political folklore. The C4I security system which was to cost Greece 225 m USD for the protection of the Olympic Games is reported in the media today as having cost the Greek taxpayer over a billion Euros, and the system never functioned! All this was known by western governments who all wanted their own companies to feast on the dying body of the Greek economy. How could any economy, our own included, survive under these cisrcumstances?

The protagonist-culpits are known - even to the man in the street and yet… not a word from Mr Oli Ren, Mrs Merkel, Mr Almounia, the IMF or Washington about the secret horde: a treasure trove so vast that some experts estimate it may be equal to a high proportion of the US gold reserves at Fort Knox. We are talking of money deposited in European and US banks by private individuals who held government posts in Greece in cooperation with European and US corporations/contractors.

The situation is another manifestation of the Mobutu Syndrome where there is total silence from western governments and their leaders when another country, in this case Greece, is systematically drained of its wealth by a coterie of criminals causing the national economy to become unstable, foreign debt to balloon out of control, the living standard of ordinary citizens to be depressed while the IMF and the EU push the burden for austerity programmes onto the backs of those who had no part in the siphoning off of their national wealth – the People.

The suspicion here is that the EU and the US are not demanding that Greece recover its stolen funds because the money has for at least thirty years been sent for safekeeping to banks in London, Vaduz, Paris, Brussels, Geneva, Zurich, New York, to Monaco and to other safe financial havens of the western world. It appears then that as long as the money stays there, and the vaults remain full of stolen Greek Euros, that European police forces, Interpol, and the intelligence agencies who monitor illegal activity will continue to turn a blind eye to a crime so monumental in scope and far reaching in its social effects that it has brought a historic European country with a healthy tourist industry, the world’s largest merchant fleet and a dynamic and intelligent populace to the brink of penury, just as the Congo, home of huge deposits of uranium, gold, diamonds and other minerals was looted by its President Mobutu Seso Seko, the “Rooster who Could Impregnate a Hundred Chickens”, with the tacit encouragement of Europe and the US, forcing that country into abject poverty, civil war and perpetual instability.

It is time for the EU to immediately halt its demands for austerity measures, and for our own government in Athens to stop pandering to Mrs Merkel and Mr Almunia and other leaders of the EU who know very well which banks in their own countries are protecting the anonymity of the illegal funds -funds belonging to Greek ministers who have deposited billions of criminal Euros in bribes handed to them by companies such as Siemens and other associated western defence industries.

It is now time for us, and for Europe and the US, to clear the table, to put the Mobutu Syndrome into the wastebasket where it belongs and to name the ministers, as the west did with corrupt Kenyan politicians. It is unacceptable for Germany, France and Britain and others to tolerate corruption of our politicians by their own national companies, even if the reason for this is that the Greek ministers are keeping the stolen funds in British, French, German, Lichtenstein and Swiss banks and offering those countries a comfortable - albeit criminal - financial cushion.

Of particular interest is the question of what is being done by Scotland Yard, the SFO, Interpol and the investigating prosecutor of Munich and other law enforcement agencies against domestic firms and individuals associated with the Siemens bribery recipient accounts at ABM AMRO in Monaco, the Fairways account at UBS in Basel, and whether they are looking into who was the recipient of a (tiny by Greek standards, but important for finding the recipient) 785,000 Euro payment on July 20th, 2004 (the same day that the Greek government paid a 31,000,000 Euro installment to the C4I SAIC-Siemens consortium) made by WEAWIND, named by the Greek press as a vehicle for channelling illegal payments on behalf of Siemens. So far the German investigatory authorities and those of Greece have said nothing concerning this payment, or if they are investigating its recipient.

Western governments have neither named the crooked politicians, as they did with African politicians, nor banned them from entering their countries, nor have they come out in the open and offered to help the Greek government recover the stolen money, thus allowing Greece to meet its obligations without taxing its faltering economy.

The EU-imposed austerity measures and resultant unemployment are driving the country into unknown territory with the spectre of civil unrest no longer just the figment of an alarmist’s imagination. If those in power in the EU, Mr Oli Ren, Mr Almounia, Mr Sarkozi, Mrs Merkel, Mr Brown, and their comrades want to see Greece paying off their foreign debt and climb back to financial health, let them look into the Greek ministerial accounts in banks in their own countries and order those British, German, Swiss, French and US banks to remit all criminally obtained funds to the Central Bank of Greece in the name of the Greek people. Then we can start to pay off our foreign debt. As for the banks that were custodians of the bribes and stolen Greek billions, let the FBI, CIA, MI6, Scotland Yard, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies of the west take the bank managers aside and whisper into their ears that the days of making easy money by laundering hundreds of billions of Euros stolen from the Greek economy are over. For ever.

It will be to everyone’s interest.

The alternative is for the corruption that has eaten into the foundations of Greece’s economic life to one day - in the near future – possibly be transformed into a domino that could tilt, fall, and destabilize the whole of Europe’s economy, with unforeseen results for the very survival of our society as we have known it up to now.

The Writing is on the Wall.

The Mantheakis Post - Olympic and Aegean Airlines Merge in Greece

2010-02-23T16:19:00.007+02:00

It was announced yesterday by the chairman of Olympic Air - the recently privatised successor to Olympic Airlines - and by the head of Aegean Airlines that an agreement had been reached for a merger of the two flagship Greek air carriers.

Andreas Vgenopoulos, the chairman of the MIG Fund group, and Vassilakis, the owner of Aegean Air announced they had applied to the Commission for Competition for permission to merge the two carriers.

Last night Vgenopoulos gave a rare interview to Greek ALTER television anchorman Nikos Hadzinikoloau explaining that the economies of scale and the efficiency of the two merged airlines would make the new carrier into a competitive and successful airline that would be able to offer better service and lower air fares to passengers. Vgenopoulos went on record to say that jobs would not be affected, something that was well received in the current economic climate in Greece, and added that George Papandreou, the new socialist government Prime Minister, was the last hope for the Greek economy after years of public sector mismanagement and investor unfriendly fiscal policies.

Vgenopoulos, a former marine lawyer who has built his MIG and Marfin group into the largest and most diversified business conglomerate in Hellas, has a positive public image among Greeks, having managed to become the largest domestic employer, while at the same time keeping himself out of controversy and scandals. Neither his private life nor his public appearances have attracted the attention of the tabloid and lifestyle media, and today he is that rare animal among the Greek plutocracy, a "Mr Clean".

Olympic Air had been one of the few MIG investments to have been doing badly, and is reputed to have cost Vgenopoulos and his Middle East fund partners a 20 million USD per month loss since they took over the state carrier on October of 2009. It is something that he clearly intends to reverse. Those who know him have little doubt that the new international carrier, which will be dominant in the Greek passenger and tourist market, will soon go into the black. A ray of hope for Greece and for Olympic employees and their families in what are perhaps the darkest days the Greek economy has gone through since the Second World War.

The Mantheakis Post - Samaras Triumphs at New Democracy Pre- Convention Rally in Athens

2010-02-21T19:50:00.006+02:00

Antonis Samaras, the recently elected New Democracy centre-right opposition party leader today was met with a standing ovation by an estimated 16,000 political supporters in the Athens Peace and Friendship Sports closed stadium. Samaras had recently emerged as the winner in a bitterly contested leadership struggle in November with the then expected winner, Mrs Dora Bakoyannis Mitsotakis, foreign minister in the last Karamanlis government. Mrs Bakoyannis, scion of a powerful and controversial political dynasty had lost to Samaras when hundreds of thousands of ND supporters who had not gone to the polls in October in disgust at the way the party was being run, had left their homes to vote in ballots all over Greece, determined not to allow Mrs Bakoyannis to become the leader of the party.

Her perceived arrogant manner during the contest and her declarations on television worked against her as Samaras, with his urbane manner, clear cut national political positions and boyish charm brought voters out in droves. Bakoyannis lost, and since then has not helped party unity with her statements against Samaras with her obvious dislike of the democratically elected ND leader. Her grimaces and dagger- like stares at party meetings when Samaras is talking have left a bitter taste in the mouths of supporters of ND who expect their parliamentarians and comrades to respect the result of the November leadership vote.

Mrs Bakoyannis has found herself losing power and popularity by the day and this was made very clear to her in today's pre-Congress meeting when she walked into the packed stadium to a chilly reception, with perhaps only 50-100 ND members clapping for her as she entered the large stadium. By contrast all 16,000 present stood up as Samaras entered to deafening applause by those present. The meeting in itself only had two speeches. The occasion was a warming up to the party Congress in June, but for political observers the message was clear. Samaras was in undeniable charge of the party and Mrs Bakoyannis had been trivialised.

The enthusiastic cheers of the standing room only crowd present left no doubt to those present that Samaras was the undisputed leader of the main opposition party, and it was clear that the astute Samaras had organised the event to test his political power and to silence party critics who belong to the Bakoyannis-Mitsotakis camp. For Samaras it was the triumph he wanted, and for the Greek public, it was a confirmation that Samaras was the leader of New Democracy, and probably the next prime minister of Greece.

The Mantheakis Post- A Terrorist Bomb in Athens outside the offices of JP Morgan affects the Legal Process in a Major Scandal

2010-02-21T19:36:00.009+02:00

It seems that a terrorist bomb which went off outside the Athens office of JP Morgan last week prompted the Greek Minister of Justice Mr Haris Kastanides to issue an order to send to court as soon as possible many of those involved in a scandal concerning a €280 million structured bond which was issued by the Greek state in 2007.

JP Morgan, one of the banks involved in the purchase and sale of the structured bond is not expected to be indicted, nor will a German bank or other major foreign financial players. The investigation by the head of the Greek authority against money laundering and the legalisation of funds from criminal acts, George Zorbas, has resulted in a report which, though it mentioned JP Morgan and other banks such as Bayrische Vereinsbank and Morgan Stanley, has left out of the criminal equation these large foreign banks, clearing them of wrongdoing.

The €280 million structured bond has an interesting history because though there were seven previous ones of the same type, where similar commissions were paid, it is only for this bond that criminal indictments are expected after the declaration of the Greek Minister of Justice for the process to be sped up. Though it is not unusual for investigations of public scandals, especially when large sums are involved, to take years before they result in someone sitting in the dock of the accused, it will be difficult to disassociate the declarations of the Minister Justice from the bomb that was placed by the terrorists last week outside the offices of JP Morgan.If this is indeed the case it will not help the public image of the Greek legal system for it to appear that an intervention by terrorists can influence, or prompt, the Greek legal system to move in one direction or another.

Another cause of possible public concern is if indeed the investigation has not covered the ground it needs to cover in detail, that perhaps for one more time those innocent will be lumped together with parties who may be guilty. It is well known that the Greek legal system is quick to send people to court and slow to find them innocent, if indeed they are innocent. This has resulted, as we have written before, in thousands of Greeks and others being found innocent in court after years of preliminary criminal proceedings, court cases, personal and family anguish, and mounting costs for the hapless defendant.

The current economic situation of Greece and the backlog of major scandals involving misappropriation of public funds, reputed massive kickbacks, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, to politicians - such as in the unravelling Siemens case, has resulted in the Greek public, who are experiencing a series of punitive -as they see them - economic measures being imposed by the government, demanding blood. They want to see ministers in jail and stolen funds returned by those in the public sector and in Parliament whom they consider responsible for the looting of the Greek state’s coffers.

The structured bond scandal, involving various Greek and international players, is only one of the major issues in the Greek media today and vies with the Siemens scandal, the C4I Olympic Games security system scandal, the Mount Athos monastery land exchange deals, and the misleading of the European Union financial authorities by the Greek government as regards our national debt, for the attention of the public and of Parliament.

It will take very cool heads in the Papandreou government to be able to initiate Parliamentary enquiries and court proceedings without succumbing to media pressure which is fanning of the flames of public anger.

There are things that Mr Kastanides, the justice minister, will have to do in order for the truth to out in order for those guilty to be punished and public sentiment to be pacified, without innocents being burned at the stake. He must send a very clear message to the prosecutors and judges that “justice must be done”, meaning exactly that.

The fairness of the legal system is in serious question since the laws of Greece and article 86 of the Constitution give total immunity to ministers and parliamentarians who may have stolen public money or taken bribes if they had belonged to a previous administration. It is only ordinary citizens who have been implicated in the above cases - all of which involve political figures - who will be sent to court, tried, and possibly sentenced, if found guilty. The innocent presumably will be allowed to go home to lick their wounds. This is all that can be expected from the legal system, if indeed it is to function on a level playing field. It is better than nothing.

The Parliamentary enquiries, which are a separate issue, can name politicians but have no power to indict or to impeach ministers and prime ministers of previous governments. The only thing Parliament can do now with these enquiries is to shed light on which politicians took money or bribes, and cast shame on them in public, for whatever that is worth. However even that is in question since parliamentary enquiries into scandals have not had happy comclusions since each party has produced its own report and findings and these have resulted in fractured results and no clear conclusions except that the political parties taking part in parliamentary enquiries have had their own agendas and the priority has rarely been to protect the public interest by exposing those in government who have abused their position of power for personal gain.

The terrorist bomb of last week placed outside the offices of JP Morgan may have hurried up the legal proceedings regarding the €280 million structured bond but it has done little to attract attention away from the farce that has been created in Greece in the last few days after foreign press accounts referred to €700 million in commissions paid by an impoverished Greek state for financial instruments specifically created, according to Liberation newspaper of France, to disguise the country's debt, and to give the indebted country the ability to put up as collateral future income in order to purchase the financial instruments created by the inventive and highly profitable Wall Street bankers who saw a window of opportunity in countries like Greece desperate to improve their balance sheets. Whether €350 million in commission for a Goldman Sachs swap is acceptable or not, for a country like Hellas whose much needed modern new Olympic airport in Athens is reputed to have cost just this amount, is a question that we will not answer here. The fact remains that the Greek state has forfeited substantial revenues paid as airport taxes by travellers, and, according to other press reports, has alos given up revenue due to it from the highly successful toll system on the new Attica highway system in and around Athens. Both sources of government income are reputed to have been exchanged, or discounted, by use of sophisticated financial instruments sold to Greece by savvy foreign bankers.

The use of structured bonds in certain cases has resulted in the Greek government presenting a more palatable picture of its financial situation by rescheduling debts.Borrowing from Peter to pay Paul.

It is actions like these by finance ministers, coupled with profligate public spending, a massive public sector and an inefficient regulatory system for businesses, and inefficient tax collection that has pushed Greece to the very brink of bankruptcy.

As the new prime minister, George Papandreou, makes his rounds of European capitals to meet central bankers to discuss options open to Greece, it has become clear that mismanagement of the public sector by Greek administrations in the last 30 years has been primarily responsible for the imposition by the European Union of the unpopular supervisory measures to be carried out by three EU organisations.

Greece is today, after nearly 50 years of independence, very close to being a monetary protectorate of the European Union. This in itself may have certain advantages for the economy, however unpalatable it may be for us Greeks from a political standpoint, but it is a dangerous precedent for post-millennium Hellas because monetary control can very easily lead to political control. For Greece, which has critical foreign affairs issues to settle with Turkey, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and possibly with Albania, this partial de facto loss of sovereignty could mean that some EU countries’ interests which are opposed to the national interest of Greece may work to the detriment of Hellas.

In the domestic arena the upcoming court cases in Greece which will involve public figures hopefully will help bring about that most important element of ancient Greek tragedy which was the Catharsis -the Cleansing.

Whatever sins Greeks and their politicians may have committed in the past few decades, ordinary people who are struggling to live dignified lives under difficult conditions deserve to see Justice done. They deserve hope for the future - for them, their families, and their nation. It is now up to the government and the legal system to supply the building blocks for a better society and for a brighter future for all Greeks. Let them rise to the challenge now that the two main parties have new leaders, George Papandreou and Andonis Samaras, both of whom appear determined to leave behind the flotsam of previous governments and to govern the country with those politicians in their parties who are untainted by the endemic corruption of the past.

The Mantheakis Post - Greek Minister Michael Chrisochoides declares Barrack Obama is a Muslim

2010-02-11T11:49:00.005+02:00

During a particularly heated parliamentary discussion on Monday evening when the PASOK government of George Papandreou had brought a controversial immigration bill giving certain classes of immigrants Greek nationality and voting rights the almost unanimous objections of the opposition parties prompted a surprising outburst from the Minister for the Protection of the Citizen (the new name for the Ministry of Law and Order). There had been accusations from right LAOS party leader George Karatzaferis that 500,000 Muslim illegal immigrants would be allowed to become Greek citizens and that before long a flood of Muslims would result in an Al Kaida branch being established in Greece. No one was prepared for what was to follow when Michalis Chrisochoides, the Minister for Protection of the Citizen stood up to reply to the opposition parliamentary spokesmen and to respond that Muslims were not a threat to security.

"It is well known" Chrisochoides replied" that the President of the United States is a Muslim"

A stunned hush came over the entire, normally noisy, House. Unbelieving Members of Parliament wondered if they were hearing things. The government Speaker, Petsalnikos, who was presiding over the session tried to excuse his Ministerial colleague's major faux pas and also to bring him to order by saying 'our discussions should not extend to discussing the religious convictions of foreign countries' leaders'.

So much then for Barrack Obama's carefully fought presidential campaign in the US to overcome the accusations that he was either a Muslim or crypto-Muslim. So many press conferences, briefings, emails, letters by his team and all the discussions in the world's press and images of the President of the US with pastors and church leaders, and yet, in Greece, a government minister who had worked closely with the American government and security services when the 17th of November terrorist organisation had been arrested in Greece and when the Olympic Games security was being organised hand in hand with the US, and yet, here was the Greek Minister, declaring that there was no problem with Muslims since "everybody knew" that Barrack Obama "was a Muslim"!

The outburst may have shocked or amused viewers, but the point was how was it possible for a government minister, in a NATO member country, not to know that President Obama was a Christian, and not to have heard the Obama denials, broadcast and printed by all international press, of being a Muslim? The question remains, and one can imagine that for US Ambassador Speckhardt phones must have started ringing, while he himself may have been forced to make a late night phone call of protest to Minister Chrisochoides on behalf of the US President asking for an explanation.

For Greek citizens, the strange incident was a talking point, but at a time when the country has its back against the wall as Brussels ministers discuss what to do with the shattered Greek economy and what political straitjacket to put on the nation as a price for a bailout, the Chrisochoides-Obama incident was quickly put aside, no doubt to be analyzed at leisure in Athens' Kolonaki cafes when the extent of the new government belt-tightening measures has fully sunk in. The question though remains as to why the Minister said what he did on Monday night in Parliament and whether he indeed believed the US president to be a follower of Mohammed. We will probably never know.

The Mantheakis Post - Shedding light on the Greek Legal and Economic System

2010-02-08T20:16:00.013+02:00

For those unfortunate enough to have been caught up in the Greek legal system or in games with the Greek economic elite we hope that a new book written by our editor, Alexis Mantheakis, will show that they are not alone.

Dozens of businesses, many owned by Greeks of the Diaspora returning to Hellas with romantic notions of the land of their fathers, or multinationals such as Pirelli, have smashed against the immovable rocks of the Catch-22 Greek buraucratic machine and have found themselves often entangled in an endless struggle to extricate themselves from a system that is unpredictable in the least and an economic system where a handful of players and the trade unions call the shots. Add to that entrenched politico/business interests and it is indeed a lucky investor who has found himself, at the end of the day, putting up his feet and enjoying the fruits of his efforts.

We will from time to time print extracts of the book "Themis - An Investigation into Justice and Economics in Greece" for our readers. Today we begin with the introduction, in the hope that readers will have the chance to learn more about what makes the law courts and the economic system of Hellas tick, and, of course, to be forewarned.

"Themis - An Investigation into Justice and Economics in Greece"

by Alexis Mantheakis

Introduction

The entry of Greece as a full partner into the European Union caused a surge of optimism in the country and among its trading partners. It was believed that new technologies, imported management models, the adoption of the Euro, entry into an organized banking and financial system and easier access to capital would streamline the workings of the public and private sectors and make Hellas a modern state. It was considered that the imposition of new laws by Brussels, massive development grants and closer contacts with Europe would force the country shed its Byzantine business practices, public sector sloth, inefficient private business practices and encourage its leaders to modernize institutions and Greek society itself. Greece was to become a level playing field where the same laws applied to all. However, decades of massive influxes of EU government money managed by relatively few hands at the top of the political pyramid soon created a new mentality. Politicians were now in charge, to a great degree, of the movement and disbursal of capital. Interest in attracting foreign investments by companies and individuals shrank. Direct investments after the Millennium reached, in one particular year, the sad sum of only 20 million Euros, while billions were entering the country through its EU linked Ministries. Money, perhaps 85%, was now in the public sector.

The fast-track money culture became the new religion of Hellas. It was not how you made money, but whether you had it, that mattered as a new-moneyed class sprang up almost overnight. Newly established private television stations and a flock of lifestyle magazines went into a feeding frenzy over the spending habits of the “oikonomimenoi” – the New Rich. No one cared any more about social convention or where one came from, but where you were. Politicians were part of the financial scene. Whereas traditional pols in the past had sold houses, village vineyards and whittled away their wives dowries to finance their careers, politicians now sported Armani suits, bought their wives thousand dollar pairs of shoes by the dozen, and built staggering marble and glass neo-Classic mansions in the exclusive northern suburbs of Athens, while smoking 100 dollar cigars and hanging about in 5 star hotel restaurants and bars, on salaries often of around just 10,000 Euros a month. The jewellery shops of exclusive Voukourestiou Street saw the green shoots of a new economic spring, and sales boomed. International designers of note were all there, and opened shops in the flashy marble malls to cater to the vanity and wealth of their eager customers.

Conspicuous spending became a must, but there was a price to pay since competition became more and more fierce among the country’s new plutocracy as to who would rule the roost and how they would exclude more newcomers. From the 300 families who ran Greece’s political and economic system in the early Sixties, by 2000 there were perhaps just 10-15 families calling the shots. The game had become more fierce and those who wanted to be on top moved out of their traditional businesses, amassing conglomerate interests in the media, in shipping, in banking, in agriculture, and so on.

Politicians, who themselves were in charge of administering EU billions, hobnobbed with the new elite as equals, while the judiciary found itself somewhere in between, called to offer immunity to the politicians whenever needed.

The politicians, after some close calls with the law, loosened loopholes in the legal system, making it practically impossible for a minister to be indicted, while the system looked to catch the minnows, and quite often, the innocent. As ruling political parties let each other off the hook in massive public sector bribery and swindling scandals, a powerless judiciary stood by. Judges became less efficient in administering justice since they often had to rule on 30 and 40 cases in one day.

Politics took deep root in the judiciary, and often it was felt, with justification, that legal decisions were politically motivated. There were other problems too. The work of the legal system meant that on a regular basis wrongly-accused ordinary citizens would only get acquitted in the Appeals Courts, or in the Supreme Court, after years of anguish, mounting costs, and a damaged reputation for the hapless accused.

The reason lies in the ease in which an investigating prosecutor can indict a citizen and charge him criminally. Proof is not needed. Strong indications of guilt are not required, only a random indication, whether this is a negative press article, a statement by a dishonest witness, or sometimes a total lack of evidence in which case the citizen may become the accused for “ holding back the facts”. In one memorable case a well known citizen from a prominent European industrial family was indicted for instigation to perjury when he was absent from the country at the time of the alleged offence and was unaware of what was going on. He was indicted with the justification that “he appears to be innocent, but should be given the chance to prove this in court”. It took him 3 years, the support of a legal team of 4 lawyers, including a law professor, to be exonerated by unanimous decision of a 3 member court of First Instance. By that time the damage was done.

The system does usually work, in the end. Someone innocent may find himself in the dock as the accused, and after a few years will probably be acquitted. The system may work at the court level, but it has failed hundreds of thousands of Greeks and foreign citizens at the investigatory/indictment level when indictments of innocents are as common as sparrows in summer.

In post-millennium Greece the judiciary also has its own particular problems. Senior judges and prosecutors, for the first time, are in prison for fixing cases for money, carrying out extortion, and being caught for crimes which were previously discussed but never proven. Dealing with political cases was also a problem for them. There was one set of laws for the politicians (with a multi-tier level of investigations and procedure, plus a statute of limitations for politicians embedded in the Constitution and guaranteeing immunity to the political miscreant almost every time) and another system of laws for everyone else.

This book looks into the labyrinthine Greek politico-economic system with its related, and often opaque, judicial and political system. We have examined a series of high profile cases and political scandals that have made news in Greece and look into stories that mirror the deficiencies of the judiciary and financial sectors of Greece, stories intended to shed light for the reader on the dark corners of the workings of Greece’s public sector economics and on its judiciary system.

The hope is that “those things which have not been done, may be done, and those things which have been done may be undone” so that the country that gave the world Democracy and the concept of fairness may, to some degree at least better protect European and Greek citizens, should they choose to tie their destinies and fortunes with European Hellas.