Greek Tax Scandal Distracts From a Collection Shortfall
Published: January 5, 2013
(Page 2 of 2)
One study by researchers from the University of Chicago and Virginia Tech estimated that tax evasion costs Greece about $37 billion a year, equivalent to nearly 15 percent of economic output. The study found that doctors, engineers, accountants and lawyers were “the primary tax-evading occupations.”
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Former Greek Official Is Said to Have Obstructed Tax Inquiry(December 29, 2012)
The reports were released shortly before Greece’s financial crimes squad accused Mr. Papaconstantinou late last month of removing the names of three of his relatives from the Lagarde list.
Those accounts belonged to a cousin of Mr. Papaconstantinou’s, her husband and the spouse of another cousin. On Wednesday, the cousin, Eleni Papaconstantinou-Sikiaridis, resigned from her post at the Greek privatization agency, saying in a letter that the money held in the HSBC Geneva account was “the legal wealth of myself and my husband.”
Mr. Papaconstantinou has vehemently denied the accusations and has said that he worked to clamp down on tax evasion as finance minister from 2009 until 2011. “I handed to the tax authorities all the files which I received from the French authorities,” he said in an e-mail. “I am not in a position to confirm that the original information received in 2010 contained the three files concerned,” he added, about his relatives.
“If the original is identical to the new one sent by the French authorities two weeks ago, this means that someone removed the names after I handed the files over,” he said.
Mr. Papaconstantinou told Parliament in November that he had asked the head of the financial crimes unit at the time to investigate only the names of the 20 biggest account holders on the list. In the e-mail interview, he said that an aide in his office pulled together the names, which he said accounted for about half of the money in the accounts.
He said he had been uneasy releasing the full 2,000 names to financial investigators for fear that they would be leaked. “Surely it is easier to safeguard an investigation of 20 people than one of 2,000 people,” he said.
Mr. Papaconstantinou testified that he then passed the entire file in June 2011 to the head of Greece’s financial crimes unit, Ioannis Diotis, who later gave it to Mr. Papaconstantinou’s successor, Evangelos Venizelos, the current leader of the Socialists and a rival of Mr. Papaconstantinou’s.
Mr. Diotis said that Mr. Venizelos did not give him orders to investigate the names on the list. Mr. Venizelos said Mr. Diotis had told him the material was unusable as it had been illegally acquired. Mr. Venizelos added that he passed the memory stick to the prime minister, Mr. Samaras, last October after Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras said the authorities could not find the original list.
On Thursday, Syriza called for an investigation into Mr. Papaconstantinou and Mr. Venizelos, and it labeled the current coalition government “the architects of corruption, and of the cover-up of corruption.”
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