Vaxevanis Says Oligarchs Rule Greece

Greek investigative journalist Costas Vaxevanis, acquitted on charges of invasion of privacy but facing prosecution again for publishing the names of 2,062 Greeks with $1.95 billion in deposits in a Swiss bank that still haven’t been checked for tax evaders, has accused the government of continuing to protect the powerful and the privileged.
In a commentary in the New York Times, Vaxevanis said democracy is a pretense in the country that invented it and that Greece is controlled by tight circles of oligarchs who pay off politicians who, in turn, insulate them from taxes and hand out sweetheart government deals.
While he said the country’s crushing economic crisis has largely been caused by decades of New Democracy Conservative and PASOK Socialist governments padding public payrolls with hundreds of thousands of unqualified workers for decades in return for votes, he said it’s the rich who rule, even as the country stays on the edge of economic collapse.
“A small clique exercises all meaningful political power,” he wrote. “The real problem with the public sector is the tiny elite of business people who live off the Greek state while passing themselves off as ‘entrepreneurs.’ They bribe politicians to get fat government contracts, usually at inflated prices. They also own many of the country’s media outlets, and thus manage to ensure that their actions are clothed in silence,” he added.
While Greeks are being forced to pay a 100 percent property tax surcharge – in their electric bills with the threat of power being turned off if they don’t pay – he said that those with homes of more than 21,000 square feet got a tax reduction of 60 percent.
The scheme, he said, was engineered by then finance minister Evangelos Venizelos, now the head of PASOK. “Mr. Venizelos thus carved out a big exemption for the only people who could afford to pay the tax: the rich. (Mr. Venizelos is also the man responsible for a law granting broad immunity to government ministers.)”
Venizelos also has escaped questioning about his handling of the list of Greeks with deposits in the Geneva branch of HSBC and why it wasn’t vetted for tax cheats, while his predecessor as finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, is set to be questioned in an investigation into who removed the names of three of his relatives.
Critics said that Prime Minister and New Democracy chief Antonis Samaras is protecting Venizelos – his otherwise rival – from questioning because PASOK, along with the tiny Democratic Left, are his coalition partners and there are fears the government could fall if tinged by another scandal.
Vaxevanis said the list hasn’t been checked for more than two years because the government is trying “to conceal the ugly reality: rich people were evading taxes while their desperate fellow citizens were searching the trash for food.”
The list is named for former French finance minister Christine Lagarde, now head of the International Monetary Fund, who gave it to Papaconstantinou in 2010. He said it vanished. When current Finance Minister Yiannis Stournaras vowed to find it, prompting Venizelos to say he had kept a copy but never acted on it. He gave it to Samaras.
Vaxevanis said successive governments concealed the list. “The reason is simple. The Lagarde list implicates a corrupt group that answers to the name of democracy even as it casually nullifies it: officials with offshore companies, friends and relatives of government ministers, bankers, publishers and those involved in the black market.”
Greek workers, pensioners and the poor have seen big pay cuts, tax hikes and slashed pensions under the austerity measures imposed by the government on orders of the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) in return for $325 billion two bailouts. Troika demands for a crackdown on tax evaders have largely been ignored as despite a roundup of some alleged tax cheats, there hasn’t been a single major prosecution.
The atmosphere of corruption pervades Greece, Vaxevanis said, because of deals made between politicians, the media and the rich. “Such shenanigans have gone on for decades. The public is deprived of real information, as television stations, newspapers and online news sites are controlled by the economic and political elite.”
Noting record unemployment and desperation, Vaxevanis said there’s little hope for Greece as long as it continues to be run by the rich and powerful who are above the law, and as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is exploiting rage toward the ruling class to soar in acceptance.
“The Greek people must remount their bicycle of democracy by demanding an end to deception and corruption. Journalists need to resist manipulation and rediscover their journalistic duties,” he said. He added: “The government should revive Greece’s ancient democratic heritage — instead of killing the messenger.”