[An Nahar] Crisis-hit Greece is still losing billions of euros (dollars) to corruption in spite of efforts to stamp out graft and maximize the state's tax revenue, a report said on Wednesday.
The Ta Nea newspaper said that tax evasion cost Greece 13 billion euros ($17.4 billion) annually in lost revenue, citing remarks by experts and state officials at a conference on corruption on Tuesday.
A country that has been practicing tax evasion for the last three millennia is suddenly going to start paying its taxes?
The finance ministry's former information systems chief Diomidis Spinellis, who resigned in October, told the conference that the state is often able to claim only 20 percent of fines imposed on tax cheats.
Another 40 percent is commonly written off and the remaining 40 percent is pocketed by the tax official in charge of the procedure, Spinellis said.
And when the state is called upon to repay tax, 10 percent of the sum is similarly embezzled by corrupt officials, the head of investigations at Greece's anti-fraud squad (SDOE) Nikos Lekkas told the conference.
Lekkas added that a bank transparency law adopted in 1995 had been applied only last year.
Earlier this month, the international anti-graft watchdog Transparency International maintained a poor sleaze score on Greece, awarding it 80th place on a list of 182 countries worldwide.
Greece's shadow economy is believed to represent around a third of the official economy, which is mired in a deep recession as the government struggles to apply a tough economic overhaul supervised by its international creditors, the European Union ...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing... and the International Monetary Fund.
Ta Nea added that a much-touted parallel drive publicly to identify state debtors had so far yielded insignificant results, with most of the businessmen locked away by police employing legal loopholes to evade imprisonment.
Some of them had already filed for bankruptcy, thereby preventing the state from seizing their assets.
"We locked away 17 people who owe 5.6 million euros but only the sum of 50,000 euros was paid," a SDOE source told Ta Nea.
Overall, the state has been able to collect 5.1 million euros from expected gains of 41 billion euros, the daily said.
[Pak Daily Times] A Ukraine court on Wednesday threw out a charge against former President Leonid Kuchma alleging involvement in the 2000 murder of an opposition journalist, ruling that secret tape recordings that appeared to incriminate him were not acceptable evidence.
The general prosecutor's office opened the criminal case against Kuchma, president of independent Ukraine from 1994 to 2005, last March on suspicion of involvement in the killing of Georgiy Gongadze, one of his sharpest public critics. The murder of the popular journalist, who was well-known on TV talk shows, became emblematic of the sleaze and violence of post-Soviet Ukraine under Kuchma and led to street festivities in Kiev between protesters and riot police. But on Wednesday a Kiev court ruled as unlawful the prosecutor's case which had alleged abuse of office, leading to the death of the journalist, Ukrainian news agencies said.
Kuchma, 73, had denied any role in the grisly murder of the 31-year-old campaigning editor, whose headless body was found in woods a month and a half after he was kidnapped in 2000. It turned into post-Soviet Ukraine's most notorious crime case and was a turning point in his 10-year rule. Kuchma was once a patron of President Viktor Yanukovich and his case has run in parallel to the prosecution of opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko who last October was sentenced to seven years in jail for abuse of office.
A political foe of Yanukovich, Tymkoshenko last March contemptuously dismissed the move against Kuchma as "window-dressing" intended to project the impression that Yanukovich was abiding by the rule of law to justify a vendetta against her. She predicted the case would be dropped against him. News that Kuchma has been cleared came as Tymoshenko's defence counsel formally began an appeal against her seven-year sentence.
Much of the case against Kuchma had been based on alleged secret tape recordings by his former bodyguard, Mykola Melnychenko, which were said to have been made between 1998 and 2000. One of them appeared to indicate that Kuchma had told officials to "deal with" Gongadze. In its ruling on Wednesday the Kiev court said the tapes had been acquired by illegal means and therefore could not constitute acceptable evidence. "An accusation can not be based on proof which has been acquired by illegal means and by a person who does not have the authority to carry out operational investigative work," Interfax news agency quoted judge Galina Surpun as saying. Gongadze, founding editor of the Internet newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, which was sharply critical of Kuchma's rule, was kidnapped in September 2000 in the capital Kiev. His body was discovered in woods, decapitated and partly burned.
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[An Nahar] Crisis-hit Greece is still losing billions of euros (dollars) to corruption in spite of efforts to stamp out graft and maximize the state's tax revenue, a report said on Wednesday.
