Author Topic: Charity con charges  (Read 8969 times)

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Offline Maik

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Charity con charges
« on: Monday, 17 February, 2014 @ 16:31:10 »
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Greek authorities say they have charged the head of a demining charity, his wife and seven other people with fraud and money laundering involving 9 million euros ($12 million) in public funding.

In Monday's statement, police say the unnamed Greek NGO received the money between 2000 and 2004 from the Foreign Ministry to clear mines in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon and Iraq. The suspects include three serving Greek diplomats.

Police allege the entire sum was illegally obtained as the NGO did not meet official funding conditions and that no progress reports were submitted. They also say Greek embassies in countries where the demining was carried out did not monitor implementation and that supervision of the NGO's expenses by the foreign ministry was "non-existent."
http://www.montrealgazette.com/news/Greece+charges+over+alleged+million+fraud+involving/9516054/story.html

Offline Maik

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Re: Charity con charges
« Reply #1 on: Tuesday, 18 February, 2014 @ 22:00:35 »
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The alleged fraud at the IMI is believed to by a symptom of a much wider problem in Greece, where hundreds of similar organisations existed for decades, without proper oversight on their activities and, more importantly, their finances.

Until recently, about 600 NGOs were registered with Hellenic Aid, which is run by the finance ministry's directorate general of international development cooperation. In 2011, it was revealed that these organisations had received an estimated €140m in state funding, from 2000 to 2010.

As an Eleftherotypia article which exposed the scale of the problem for the first time pointed out, countries with similar populations to Greece, like Holland and Denmark, had only 200 or so international developmental organisations.

It was only following the onset of the crisis in Greece that parliament, through its committee on institutions and transparency, attempted to cast light on the funding of these NGOs by the state. In a report, two MPs noted that there was an absence of a clear institutional framework governing the NGOs and a lack of coordination when it came to funding them.

The situation was so cloudy that the MPs were unable to determine the actual number of NGOs nor the amounts of subsidies that they had received. But they estimated that it ran to several hundred million euros.
http://www.enetenglish.gr/?i=news.en.home&id=1766

Offline Maik

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Re: Charity con charges
« Reply #2 on: Wednesday, 19 February, 2014 @ 15:20:48 »
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The Financial Police is investigating some 6,000 nongovernmental organizations for their management of state funding, Kathimerini has learned, as a scandal involving a de-mining NGO snowballed into a political issue on Tuesday.
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite1_1_18/02/2014_537496

Offline Maik

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Re: Charity con charges
« Reply #3 on: Thursday, 20 February, 2014 @ 19:36:31 »
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SCARCELY a week goes by in Greece without new allegations of corruption in the public sector. This time it was the foreign ministry’s turn, after a 20-month police investigation found evidence of the widespread misuse of funds provided to about 600 Greek NGOs working overseas, mainly in the Balkans, between 2000 and 2008.

One organisation, the International Mine Initiative (IMI), set up to remove landmines in Bosnia, Lebanon and Iraq, has come under particularly close scrutiny. IMI claimed on its website to be “a world leader” in de-mining operations. But it is unclear how many of the eight de-mining programmes undertaken with €9m of foreign-ministry funding were actually completed.

Some of the funds allocated for de-mining may have served another purpose, according to security analysts in Athens. IMI is suspected of helping to protect Radovan Karadzic, the former Bosnian Serb leader now on trial for war crimes at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, while he was on the run from NATO forces. Dusan Tesic, a former member of Mr Karadzic’s security team, was hired by IMI as an “enforcer” for one of its programmes in Bosnia. Soon afterwards, IMI replaced its local multi-ethnic team with workers from UNIPAK, a Bosnian Serb company with ties to Mr Karadzic’s former police minister.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2014/02/corruption-greece


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Three leading non-governmental organizations in Greece are protesting "unprecedented attacks" on NGOs in the country following fraud allegations involving publicly funded local groups.

The Greek sections of ActionAid, Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature say NGOs should not be victimized because of some entities' "lack of transparency and illicit aims."
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/02/20/3948269/greek-sections-of-global-ngos.html



Offline Maik

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Re: Charity con charges
« Reply #4 on: Wednesday, 26 February, 2014 @ 14:59:43 »
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Set up by former prime minister and culture minister Kostas Karamanlis in 2004, Ergo Politon didn't come cheap: its chairman/CEO was paid €9,500 a month while its offices cost €16,500 a month in rent

An organisation established under a previous New Democracy government to register all the “volunteering organisations” (NGOs) in Greece managed to spent up to €7.5m in state funding from 2005 to 2011, without achieving much of what it was set up to do. 

NGO representatives have told Eleftherotypia... they believed it was set up to provide jobs to certain people.
http://www.enetenglish.gr/?i=news.en.home&id=1781