Νέα αναφορά των Financial Times

Ρεπορτάζ στους Financial Times , για την άμεση παρέμβαση της υπουργού Ανάπτυξης Άννας Διαμαντοπούλου στα κρούσματα διαφθοράς στο Υπουργείο Ανάπτυξης με αναλυτικές δηλώσεις της , όπου υπογραμμίζεται η αποφασιστικότητά της να εξαλείψει το κύκλωμα διαφοράς. Στο ρεπορτάζ επισημαίνεται ότι αποτελεί μία σπάνια προσπάθεια για την πάταξη της διαφθοράς, η οποία θεωρείται ότι αποτελεί σημαντικό εμπόδιο στην προσέλκυση των ξένων επενδύσεων στην Ελλάδα:

By Kerin Hope in Athens and Joshua Chaffin in Brussels

The Greek government has suspended more than 100 civil servants involved in awarding investment grants, following the arrest of two officials for taking bribes.

Thursday’s suspensions, which followed a sting operation this week by the SDOE financial police, mark a rare attempt to crack down on graft, seen as a significant obstacle to attracting foreign direct investment to Greece.

“We are going to unravel this knitted pullover of corruption,” said Anna Diamantopoulou, a former European commissioner who took over as development minister last week after a cabinet reshuffle.

Ms Diamantopoulou said the entire staff of the investment department would be replaced immediately and that their bank accounts would be examined by the SDOE.

“We appeal to potential investors to report attempts at blackmail… There will be zero tolerance in future,” she said.

Officials at the development ministry’s private investment department make a practice of demanding backhanders equal to between two and four per cent of the value of a grant application, according to Aristides Markou, a hotelier. The two unnamed officials were arrested while accepting a €120,000 cash payment in return for expediting Mr Markou’s application for a €13m grant to build a resort complex in southern Greece. They had earlier demanded €700,000, he said.

Ms Diamantopoulou said an “overriding priority” for Greece following its successful debt restructuring was to create a business-friendly environment for investors. She promised to contact individual companies, many of them German, to help them overcome problems with Greek bureaucracy.

Her crackdown coincided with encouraging early results in the effort to patch Greece’s notoriously leaky tax collection system. The government gathered just under €1bn in back taxes last year – more than double its target – according to a new report published by the special European Union task force created to help Greece overhaul its economy.

The task force was created last July by the European commission, the EU’s executive arm, to help Greece reform its bloated public administration and improve its use of EU development funds. It provides technical assistance through dozens of civil servants on loan from the commission and member states.

Fixing Greece’s tax collection system has emerged as one of its top priorities. The country boasts an estimated €60bn in outstanding unpaid taxes, according to the task force, of which €8bn could be collected.

In its second quarterly report, the task force called for better progress to crack down on tax evasion by wealthy individuals and large corporations. “These will be the focus of particular technical assistance in the coming months,” the report says.

On a more troubling note, it revealed that the campaign to stimulate more bank lending to Greek companies starved of liquidity – one of the most urgent complaints of the local business community – barely got off the ground last year. Of the nearly €1.3bn in schemes to support loans to small and medium-sized businesses, only €11m was disbursed in 2011.

One idea under consideration is to use EU development money to guarantee up to €500m in loans from the European Investment Bank to Greek banks, which could, in turn, lend the money to small businesses.

The task force also acknowledged the challenges of trimming Greece’s bureaucracy to improve the environment for new businesses. It found, for example, that a Greek company may have to seek approvals from 10 different ministries and 30 agencies before it could begin exporting its goods.

“There is too much red tape, too many administrative barriers,” Horst Reichenbach, head of the task force, told reporters in Athens.

March 15, 2012