GREECE’S elite used to see stashing funds in Swiss bank accounts as an insurance policy. Until the country joined the euro zone, fears of a sudden devaluation or a freeze on capital movements loomed large. Then came a rush to transfer money made in the black economy to financial havens abroad.After many years of turning a blind eye to this illegal practice, a desperately broke Greek government is at last cracking down. The tax declarations of almost 2,000 Greeks with accounts at the Geneva branch of HSBC, a bank, are being scrutinised by officials at SDOE, the financial police. Their names were on a computer disk sent in 2010 by Christine Lagarde, then French finance minister, to her Greek counterpart, George Papaconstantinou.The “Lagarde list” went missing in mid-2011 but turned up again recently when Evangelos Venizelos, Mr Papaconstantinou’s successor as finance minister, sent a copy to the office of Antonis Samaras, who is now prime minister. Hot Doc, a Greek investigative magazine, then got hold of another copy and published all 2,000 names.Several politicians and their wives and many members of prominent business families appear on the list. Yet most attention has focused on Maria Panteli, an office manager whose account contained €550m ($719m), about one-third of the total in all the accounts. Ms Panteli was suspected at first of acting as a...
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