5-Feb-2012 - The Powerful Resist Change to Greek Tax System

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But last September, Mr. Spinellis, who interrupted a brilliant career as a computer science professor in 2009 to work for the Greek Finance Ministry, resigned, frustrated that officials did little or nothing with the data he generated. “I football jerseys cannot remember getting an enthusiastic response,” Mr. Spinellis, 45, said with characteristic understatement in an interview in his tiny, book-filled office at Athens University of Economics and Business, where he has returned to teaching. In exchange for the bailout money that Greece needs by March to avoid what could be a catastrophic default, the country’s foreign lenders have demanded radical changes to make the state more efficient and bring in more tax revenue. But as Mr. Spinellis’s experience showed, good intentions and directives can easily be evaded or sabotaged by the political class, if its members have not signed on. In Greece, the government of the technocratic prime minister, Lucas Papademos, is proving powerless to transform an inefficient public administration that has long served as a power base for the same political leaders — including most of the current government’s ministers — who are now being asked to dismantle it. It is a formula for gridlock that virtually guarantees, political and financial experts say, that the Greek government will never carry out the kind of basic changes that are being demanded of it. “In Greece, the real power is the power of resistance, the power of inertia,” said Giorgos Floridis, a former member of Parliament from the Socialist Party who recently founded a reform-minded civic movement. Today, he said, the main power centers in Greece — political parties, business leaders, professional guilds, public sector unions and the media — are fighting to preserve their privileges, blocking structural changes that could make the economy more functional. The slow pace of change is one reason the government and its so-called troika of foreign lenders — the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — have relied more heavily on swifter measures, like hard-to-evade tax increases and across-the-board wage cuts, that have helped push the economy deeper into recession. Change MLB jerseys is all the more difficult when corruption appears to be woven into the fabric of the Greek state. Last month, Yiannis Kapeleris, the Finance Ministry’s general secretary for tax and customs affairs was forced to resign after being placed under criminal investigation in a complex case involving failure to collect fines imposed on fuel companies. He denies the charges. Also last month, the man in charge of the Finance Ministry’s Financial Crimes Unit in the northern city of Salonika, Christos Papachatzis, was among 53 people arrested on charges of extortion and leading a protection racket that lent money at usurious rates. According to a wiretapped telephone conversation reported in the Greek news media, he reassured the leader of the gang, Markos Karaberis, that he would not act on a complaint against him. Asked about the arrest in an interview, Pantelis Economou, the deputy finance minister and also a high-ranking member of the Socialist Party, said: “He’s alleged to be a member of a gang, and it seems it’s true. He was the chief there. He was also my party’s member. I sacked him the next day.” Mr. Papachatzis denied the charges through his lawyer, who said his client was the target of politically motivated prosecutors intent on demonizing the finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, who is widely seen to be vying to become the leader of the Socialist Party. In another sign of the nexus between the criminal underworld and Greek politics, all those arrested in the Salonika investigation had ties to the three parties supporting Mr. Papademos’s coalition: the Socialists, the center-right New Democracy party and the hard-right Popular Orthodox Rally, known as L.A.O.S. (Mr. Karaberis ran for a regional office last year with L.A.O.S., using the campaign motto “Clean hands, clear ideas.”) Mr. Spinellis was supposed to be part jerseys cheap of a new generation. He was hired through an open government initiative started by the Socialist Party to promote meritocracy over cronyism, but which critics now say was largely cronyism under another guise.

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