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This summer, a lift at Athens’ largest public hospital broke down. When a repair technician arrived at the scene he couldn’t believe his eyes: knee-deep at the bottom of the shaft were hundreds of envelopes, the repository of bribes given to doctors who, pocketing the money, had then dispensed with the telltale fakellaki.“Corruption in Greece is alive and well,” said Aliki Mouriki, a sociologist at the National Centre for Social Research. “In fact, if anything, people are now so squeezed they have fewer inhibitions about taking bribes than before the crisis.”The practice of fakellakia, or little envelopes, exchanging hands was supposed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history when creditors demanded a root-and-branch cleanup of a public system seen as the source of much of the country’s financial ills.In return for the biggest bailout in global financial history – rescue funds from the EU and IMF amounting to €240bn – it was hoped that old mentalities would change and a nation humbled by near-bankruptcy would finally dump its culture of deceit. Neither has been true.Instead, with rising poverty and runaway unemployment, malfeasance and mistrust remain widespread. Anti-corruption officials continue to be on the take while the self-employed, not least shopkeepers on popular tourist isles, fail to declare their real income.Transparency International said on Wednesday that Greece’s ranking on perceived levels of public corruption had improved from 94th place at the height of the debt crisis in 2012 to 69th this year. But Costas Bakouris, head of the watchdog’s Greek chapter, said the country remained entrenched in a crisis of values.Chronic bureaucracy is part of the problem. In the realm of red tape, corruption flourishes, impeding business and entrepreneurship. In many cases, new laws and regulations have given crooked officials more paperwork to hide behind. “It’s a vicious circle. Nothing gets done any more because it’s so much more difficult to bribe civil servants,” complained one octogenarian, who admitted he found himself hankering for the bad old days. “In the past, bribes ensured a degree of efficiency. Now nothing works,” he said.Kevin Featherstone, professor of contemporary Greek studies at the London School of Economics, said: “The optimism that the crisis would clean Greek politics was always fanciful because in a crisis people struggle to get any economic security by any means.”
Greece is considering setting up a lottery designed to encourage people to pay value added tax, by letting them enter if they can provide a valid receipt, according to a government document and media reports.The Greek government included the "VAT Lottery" in a list of proposals sent to its EU and IMF creditors on ways to battle endemic tax evasion and overcome a potential budget shortfall next year.The document, seen by Reuters on Wednesday, did not go into details on how the lottery would work, but said similar schemes had proved successful in Portugal, Malta and Slovakia.Greek newspaper Kathimerini said people would only be allowed to enter the lottery once they sent a text message containing a unique code on their VAT receipt.Customers can currently often negotiate discounts on goods and services in Greece by agreeing to take them without a receipt - allowing shoppers, shops, and workers from plumbers to builders to avoid the country's 23 percent VAT rate.
QuoteThis summer, a lift at Athens’ largest public hospital broke down. When a repair technician arrived at the scene he couldn’t believe his eyes: knee-deep at the bottom of the shaft were hundreds of envelopes, the repository of bribes given to doctors who, pocketing the money, had then dispensed with the telltale fakellaki.“Corruption in Greece is alive and well,” said Aliki Mouriki, a sociologist at the National Centre for Social Research. “In fact, if anything, people are now so squeezed they have fewer inhibitions about taking bribes than before the crisis.”The practice of fakellakia, or little envelopes, exchanging hands was supposed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history when creditors demanded a root-and-branch cleanup of a public system seen as the source of much of the country’s financial ills.In return for the biggest bailout in global financial history – rescue funds from the EU and IMF amounting to €240bn – it was hoped that old mentalities would change and a nation humbled by near-bankruptcy would finally dump its culture of deceit. Neither has been true.Instead, with rising poverty and runaway unemployment, malfeasance and mistrust remain widespread. Anti-corruption officials continue to be on the take while the self-employed, not least shopkeepers on popular tourist isles, fail to declare their real income.Transparency International said on Wednesday that Greece’s ranking on perceived levels of public corruption had improved from 94th place at the height of the debt crisis in 2012 to 69th this year. But Costas Bakouris, head of the watchdog’s Greek chapter, said the country remained entrenched in a crisis of values.Chronic bureaucracy is part of the problem. In the realm of red tape, corruption flourishes, impeding business and entrepreneurship. In many cases, new laws and regulations have given crooked officials more paperwork to hide behind. “It’s a vicious circle. Nothing gets done any more because it’s so much more difficult to bribe civil servants,” complained one octogenarian, who admitted he found himself hankering for the bad old days. “In the past, bribes ensured a degree of efficiency. Now nothing works,” he said.Kevin Featherstone, professor of contemporary Greek studies at the London School of Economics, said: “The optimism that the crisis would clean Greek politics was always fanciful because in a crisis people struggle to get any economic security by any means.”http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/03/greece-corruption-alive-and-well
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Topic: Greece: in the pits (Read 5852 times)
