Greece:
Spain:
The two main Greek coalition parties receive about 37 million Euros a
year in free money from the treasury. There is no public accounting of where
the money goes. New Democracy according to reports owes about 105 million Euros
to the state-operated ATEbank, which had to be taken over by Piraeus bank because
of bad loans, and 15 million Euros to Piraeus bank (which took over ATEbank). Reportedly
PASOK has borrowed 97 million Euros from ATEbank, plus 22 million Euros from
Attica Bank, 10 million euros from Marfin and 5 million Euros from Piraeus bank.
The only collateral the parties pledge is their taxpayer funding, which is now
around 800 percent less than they borrowed. Both parties are thought to have
mortgaged future state funding, which all Parliamentary parties receive, to
obtain the loans. Reuters reported last year that Leandros Rakintzis, Greece’s
independent inspector-general of public administration, said, “This is all
about the exchange of favors. These parties cannot pay the debt so it’s a
vicious circle in which they come to depend on the banks. It creates an
interdependence of politicians and banks.”
The Samaras led coalition has given 7
billion Euros from a recent loan of 9.2 billion Euros from international
lenders directly to the banks as part of a recapitalization in which they will
ultimately get 50 billion Euros. So the money is going around in nice circles.
There is an investigation ongoing into the circumstances under which these
loans were granted and whether any laws were broken. What this reveals is how
much the parties' form a single cartel system in which their differences were
and are only superficial, and how any change to this order would be dangerous
not only politically but financially. Substantial structural financial interest
is involved in the maintenance of the present coalition in power.
As we all know by now, the Greek parliament
has voted to investigate (but only) former finance minister George Papaconstantinou
over his handling of "Lagarde List" and the missing names of his
relatives from it. Also in Athens, a
multi-million-dollar embezzlement case involving Greece's national tourism
agency has now dealt a new blow to the austerity mongering coalition.
See:
Meanwhile in Italy there is the Monte
Dei Paschi Di Siena bank (MPS bank) corruption scandal,
with an interesting link to a big Spanish bank (Santander) and to Mario Draghi,
the president of the European Central Bank and who was favored by
the German leadership as 'the most German' of choices for the role:
"Jan 28
(Reuters) - Mario Draghi, the governor of the European Central Bank, met
Italian Finance Minister Vittorio Grilli on Monday to discuss the mounting
problems at Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the Financial Times reported on its
website on Monday, citing an unnamed government official.
In response to a
question from the FT, the European Central Bank confirmed the pair met at an
office of the Finance Ministry in Milan but gave no further comment.
Draghi, who was
formerly governor of the Italian central bank, wanted to brief Grilli on the
role the Italian central bank had played in supervising Monte dei Paschi when
it discovered during an inspection in 2010 that the bank had taken out risky
derivatives positions, according to the unnamed government official cited by
the Financial Times."
"The
possible offence is lack of supervision, which implies that the investigation
will focus on the watchdog authorities, the Bank of Italy"
"Investigators
maintain that all those in their cross-hairs subscribed to the confidential
agreement with Banco Santander to window-dress accounts and ramp the price,
generating a capital gain of more than two billion lire. This adds to the
specific offences of market-rigging, false communications, disturbance and
fraud a further charge that knits the alleged unlawful behaviour into a single
criminal design. A quickening in the pace of investigations now looks imminent."
Note that:
"In
February 2012, Nobel prize laureate in economics Joseph
Stiglitz argued that, on the issue of the impending Greek
debt restructuring, the ECB's insistence that it has to be
"voluntary" (as opposed to a default decreed by the Greek
authorities) was a gift to the financial institutions that sold credit default
insurance on that debt; a position that is unfair to the other parties, and
constitutes a moral hazard.[24]"
Spain:
In Spain there are many (too many to mention) interconnected
scandals, one of which concerns alleged bribery within the ruling party:
"A
significant portion of the donations recorded in the handwritten ledgers
secretly maintained by Luis Bárcenas, the former treasurer for the ruling
Popular Party (PP), violated party financing legislation.
Over two-thirds of the alleged donations in
these parallel accounts, which EL PAÍS brought to light
on Thursday, could never have been made through official channels, either
because they went over the 60,000-euro limit or because they were made by
individuals or businesses that were barred from being donors.
(…)
In Spain,
contributions from companies with contracts to provide services to any public
agency were illegal"
Germany:
It is not that Germany is squeaky clean:
It is not that Germany is squeaky clean:
"Deutsche
Bank hid $12 billion in losses during the financial crisis, when it was
considered to be one of the few banks strong enough to whether the recession
without government assistance, according to the claims of three former
employees who filed complaints with U.S. securities regulators.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2243817/Deutsche-Bank-hid-12BILLION-losses-financial-crisis-according-employees-claims.html#ixzz2JgkK3XWp
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Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2243817/Deutsche-Bank-hid-12BILLION-losses-financial-crisis-according-employees-claims.html#ixzz2JgkK3XWp
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook
"The US
Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations this week said the bank had
wittingly pushed high-risk assets known as collateralized debt obligations
(CDO) that would help cause the United States’ worst economic collapse since
the Great Depression.
“Our investigation found a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing,” said Sen. Carl Levin while presenting the 639-page report.
US officials documented how Germany’s largest bank assembled a $1.1 billion CDO fund known as Gemstone 7, then filled it with low-quality assets that its top CDO trader referred to as “crap” and “pigs” that needed to be sold “before the market falls off a cliff.”…"
“Our investigation found a financial snake pit rife with greed, conflicts of interest and wrongdoing,” said Sen. Carl Levin while presenting the 639-page report.
US officials documented how Germany’s largest bank assembled a $1.1 billion CDO fund known as Gemstone 7, then filled it with low-quality assets that its top CDO trader referred to as “crap” and “pigs” that needed to be sold “before the market falls off a cliff.”…"
Corruption and bribery of parliamentarians
are illegal, but in Germany only the selling and buying of votes is actually a
punishable offence. The United Nations 2005 convention against corruption is
ratified by 160 countries, but not Germany. The convention would make it
illegal to offer, promise or grant advantages to third parties. Christian
Humborg, head of Transparency International's Germany's branch said the
stalemate in Berlin over changing the law was an "unacceptable,
scandalous" arrangement and that Germany was putting itself in a
"ridiculous" position, adding that German leaders call upon other
countries to tackle corruption, but fail to implement the UN convention itself.
Corruption will blow a quarter-trillion-euro hole in Germany's economy in 2012, a new study has estimated. This is based on work by Friedrich Schneider, an economics professor at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria; it beat the professor's own estimate of seven years ago, when corruption reached a low-point (!) of €220 billion. Economists agree that bribery among public officials and private businessmen are generally dependent on the economic situation – the worse the economy, the more accepting people in authority are to the brown envelope under the table.
Corruption will blow a quarter-trillion-euro hole in Germany's economy in 2012, a new study has estimated. This is based on work by Friedrich Schneider, an economics professor at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria; it beat the professor's own estimate of seven years ago, when corruption reached a low-point (!) of €220 billion. Economists agree that bribery among public officials and private businessmen are generally dependent on the economic situation – the worse the economy, the more accepting people in authority are to the brown envelope under the table.
Thousands of lobby groups work to influence
politics and legislation in Berlin. Lobbying
is legal, but it is not transparent, the public cannot trace how and by whom
new legislation has been shaped, and currently, there is (peculiarly) no
political backing for such a move in Germany.
See:
And especially:
"Forgiving Siemens: Unraveling a
Tangled Tale of German Corruption in Greece"
Which takes us full circle to Greece again.
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