Convalesco

Pericles in Athens

If you ask Europeans about Greece’s main problem, they will answer you “the economy!“. Truth is, a decadent economy is surely the reason, hardly the cause.

Bureaucracy that in modern western countries is long gone, in Greece has it’s roots deeper than a foreigner could ever imagine.

For example, the law says that in order to complete any kind of legal action like creating a company, changing your company’s name, buying land, building a corporate building and so on, you need a public notary. The notary takes a percentage of the transaction. Apart from the notary you need to pay the lawyers public insurance fund. Since the notaries are a so called “closed profession“, the few that have a notary license make money out of it, just by existing. There’s nothing, in a contract, that a lawyer couldn’t do. So why do we need a notary? There many more professions that are likewise protected. Public pensions and the Greek insurance system is a total mess, but that’s a result too.

The reason for a trembling economy is mainly the lack of a trustworthy judicial system. Justice has long gone in Greece. Bribery is unavoidable on every scale of social life. The big scandals that hit the news, rarely cause any surprise to the average Greek who needs to pay extra money to accomplish even the most common tasks like get a license from urban planning office or have a scheduled surgery on a national hospital¹.

What current PASOK governement’s leader George Papandreou has failed to do, is to resurrect a broken justice system. This failure, makes impossible for Greeks to accept any kind of needed actions like salary cuts, pension cuts etc, to save the country from bankruptcy.

Justice: The cornerstone of Democracy

The sad thing for Greece as a state, is that the prime minister proved to be  not capable to deal with corrupted party members, corrupted deputies or corrupted businessmen. Mr. Papandreou doesn’t have the character that it takes to release the Greek justice system from the government, in order to clean up the parliament.

Everyone in Greece knows more than 15 officially corrupted politicians, for both (main) parties (ND, PASOK) who are accused for alleged corruption by the media at least once if not more. Some cases had much more then just “alleged” charges² but no action was ever taken. As a result in about thirty years of corrupted politicians no one has ever gone to jail, or even officially punished for breaking the law, stealing or mishandling large amounts of public money.

The very same day Mr. Papandreou requested for aid publicly, he asked from Greek’s to help the government to overcome the public finances crisis, by announcing that in the next months, none of his pre-election promises will be fulfilled, due to hard actions required by the European Union (and the IMF), to avoid Greece’s bankruptcy. The same day, two possibly huge scandals arise: Mr. Provopoulos, the head of Bank of Greece, among the officially most paid bankers in the world³, was accused of silencing a financial scandal taking place on the stocks market. A couple of days earlier, the famous Greek businessmen and MIG chairman, Andreas Vgenopoulos accused two main PASOK deputies, Mr Sifounakis and Mr Pangkalos, on a TV interview for money mishandling of 50 million €, providing proofs of the transaction. Nothing happened the next day: Mr Provopoulos is not under investigation and Mr Sifounakis after lying publicly, denied all charges and responded in the most naive – if not plain stupid - way on public TV show zougla. Yet Mr Papandreou seeks for public consent.

If the Greek prime minister does not face this unhealthy situations with immediate legal response, by exemplary punishing politicians who stand aside him and show a total lack of skill, honesty and common sense, Greece is doomed. It is assured that strikes will go on, public unrest will unfold and worst things are yet to happen.

There is no doubt, not even from not-supporters, that Mr Papandreou is trying hard. However, he is working in the wrong direction. If the Greek justice system continues to totter like it does today, the country will not avoid financial default in the next few months, no matter what policies the EU and the IMF try to apply and no matter how much money the country will be able to withdraw.

1. In Greece almost 50% of the salary is kept away for health insurance purposes by the Greek state. So in theory, most kind of interventions and/or medical exams are already paid by the state. [↩]
2. Like Pavlidis case, Roussopoulos case and many many others that pop up every day [↩]
3. Bank of Greece Governor Giorgos Provopoulos is among the most well-paid central bank governors in the world, according to Reuters. A list prepared by the news agency showed that Provopoulos earns 362,500 euros, or $465,885 per year, versus 345,252 euros paid to European Central Bank (ECB) President Jean-Claude Trichet. US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is paid $191,300 [€150,000]. Bank of Italy Governor Mario Draghi tops the list of EU central bankers, earning 500,000 euros. [↩]

“Eight years of G. W. Bush administration brought down to it’s knees the worldwide financial super power, the United States of America. How could a country like Greece resist to Mr. Karamanlis ?“. This is from the last series of quotes that I’ve heard about our parting prime minister.

Kostas Karamanlis, came to power with the intend to fight corruption. He ended up being admittedly the worst prime minister in Greece’s change-over history (1974-2009). The size of parting’s government fail was shown not only by scandal’s typhoon that emerged during the last two years, but also by the absolute lack of common sense from the prime minister to put in order his prime ministers. Every political scandal was forward to “justice”. The prime minister stated that “just is what is lawful” and that’s why no one got convicted. The public’s outrage was shown at the elections held on October’s 5th. The (ex) ruling party lost by 10% an almost ever-low. The entire Greek territory became socialist in a few months.

Even after his departure Mr Karamanlis showed his total lack of control over his government. He was clearly, never in control of any situation. Even smaller members of the ex-government, are trashing him after his hands-down defeat, on live TV shows. This is way too embarrassing, even for a poorly capable prime minister as himself.

There are silly conspiracy theories from New Democracy bigots. These theories state that CIA was involved in his decline, because of Karamanlis position towards Russia in the matter of gas pipeline “Burgas-Alexandroupoli”. Granted that the USA would want to sell gas via their own pipeline (south-stream)  in Greece, this has little – or nothing – to do with the bad handling of cases like local economy stagnation, corruption raise, poor foreign policy results, etc.

On the raise of Vatopedi case Mr Karamanlis said that he will take all responsibility for the scandal. At the time, most New Democracy third grade members were cheering for the braveness of Mr Karamanli’s  statement. In a political environment this usually means that he should take some tough decisions, prosecute important members of his government or even resign. None of this happened though. The people probably thought that accepting responsibility for something without taking any action looks mostly a farce and a sham.

I could hardly imagine the lack of capability of our ex-prime minister back in the days of his first election. I hope not to face the same disappointment with the new prime minister. The stakes are high, and although we all know he is not exceptionally skilled, putting a little order in Greece as it is today is not that hard. The new government looks fine, most members are new and apparently not corrupted. However, the responsibility for every negative and/or positive thing will go to the prime minister, because these are his choices after all.