The Troika doesn’t want to bring justice to Greece, it just wants to take money from it
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| Jam for Samaras today, recovery for the rest tomorrow |
In what might at first sight look
like a desperate attempt to raise money to pay off mathematically
unrepayable debt, The Slog has learned that the Athens Government is set
to sell the Mutual Fund Management subsidiary of the Bank of Greece to
an American investment consortium. This is being personally arranged and
handled by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, and The Slog can confirm
that the purchasers are personal friends of Samaras.
At least two of the members of the US
consortium set to purchase BoG’s international Diethniki subsidiary from
Greece are known to Samaras, and the lead player is a close person
friend of the Prime Minister. Their intimacy goes back many years,
probably from the time the Greek leader spent at Amherst and then
Harvard in the 1970s.The deal as a whole is clouded in doubts about the
ethics involved on both sides.
Diethniki manages funds made available
through the Bank’s branch network. It is a service for big players, but
these crooks took their funds out of the system long ago, and so the
original legitimate income stream has dried up. It seems likely that the
motives for the deal lie elsewhere: Diethniki offers a total of 35
mutual funds, 14 of them under the NBG SICAV brand name. This is managed
through the Bank’s intermediaries NBG Luxembourg Holdings and Lux
Finance Holdings. Athens sources suggest that these could represent a
perfect vehicle for discreet tax evasion by both Americans and expat
Greeks. Luxembourg is strenuously opposing EC attempts to open up its
“doubtful” banking activities. The EC would have much greater difficulty
getting an American-owned bank in Luxembourg to come clean on its
transactions: but it won’t care: what the Sprouts, lenders and Draghulas
want is some quick deficit-reducing cash. What Samaras will get out of
this is anyone’s guess.
Some might see The Slog’s doubts about the
Prime Minister’s honesty as unjustified. They shouldn’t: Samaras is a
card-carrying member of the corrupt Greek élite, a man who follows
policies and disburses funds aimed largely at feathering his own nest.
He is not remotely unique in this, but he isn’t an exception to the rule
either.
Antonis Samaras hails from Messinia. Just
north of its large city Kalamata, a brand new motorway recently opened,
cutting the time from Athens by a substantial amount. It was constructed
and completed at a time when Greek government expenditure was under the
cosh; but if you’re the PM, you can organise things such that your
constituents get an unfair advantage…..and the travel to your own
constituency becomes less arduous. Such are the ways of the Greek
political and bureaucratic class.
The Troika has little interest in changing
this culture, wanting only the survival of the euro, and safety for the
loans offered idiotically by its banker friends. Not surprisingly,
looting of the State’s tax and welfare systems has filtered down to the
desperate professional classes. All of them have seen income streams
disappear since 2008, but don’t be fooled into believing that such
behaviour is a recent phenomenon: for years, pharmacists and GPs have
been ripping off the system. Rich clients and patients can get cosmetic
drugs and procedures recorded as something different – and thus supplied
at a fraction of private practice prices. Nose jobs, botox and
facelifts being carried out in this manner represent a very common
practice. Hospital surgeons demand upfront cash payments from
life-threatened patients as a matter of course. Most of the middle class
and wealthier citizens of the larger suburban and urban centres accept
this as perfectly normal….indeed, in many cases they are complicit in
it.
Of course, the real sufferers are the
growing legions of genuinely poor Greeks, but the Troikanauts don’t GAF
about them. Only the radical Left in Greece is bothered about such
things: the PASOK/New Democracy Coalition is just a bloodstained chariot
of convenience into which lender shovels are thrust at regular
intervals.
There will be no social justice in Greece
until the Hellenic Republic defaults, and the long-dormant Greek spirit
of honourable resistance is revived. By far the best chance for this is
Syriza, the radical Leftist Party led by the increasingly savvy Alexis
Tsipras. But Tsipras himself has become more equivocal over time: he has
been cuddling up to Brussels here and there…..and is himself a product
of the privileged professional classes. My sense (having spent more time
recently in Greece) is that the Syriza leader may have learned his
lesson: we can only wait and see. But if he wants to pull the older
Greeks away from Samaras and Pasok, as a strategist it seems to me Mr
Tsipras absolutely must lay massive stress on his reforming
zeal when it comes to the corruption of privilege. And if he wants to
get rid of that, there can be no alternative to default, leaving the
eurozone, reverting to the Drachma, and placing Greece once more on a
fiscally sustainable footing. For the European Union and its Troika
accomplices have absolutely no interest in achieving any of those aims.
The country’s eurodebt management is not
sustainable: that much is obvious to any reasonably competent 12
year-old mathematician. As long as the political Establishment is in
power and Greece is in the euro, nothing of any value to the future of
Greece will change. Tsipras and his Syriza apostles should nail their
colours to the mast called Independent Greek Integrity: a fairer society
in which export growth is stimulated by marketing untainted by
kickbacks, tourism unhindered by eurozone membership, and the dignity of
ordinary Greeks is restored along with the alleviation of their plight.
Right now in Greece, radicalism represents responsibility. Maintaining Status Quo
will produce nothing more than the predictable playing and percussion
one expects from the addled brains of ageing political musicians who
know only how to sing Whatever you Want to Brussels.
I
am respectfully begging Greek Sloggers to get this post in front of
Alexis Tsipras, share it widely, and RT Twitter references to it.
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