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How the world sees Greece
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Greek Ex-Mayor Gets Life Sentence
A Greek court sentenced a former mayor to life in prison for embezzling millions of euros from the municipal budget of Greece's second-largest city.
Santa Anita Handicap: Ron the Greek figures to get different setup this year
Santa Anita Handicap: Ron the Greek figures to get different setup this year Daily Racing Form (press release) Brisset thinks that Ron the Greek can adapt to any pace scenario. A 6-year-old horse, Ron the Greek chased a moderate pace of 47.27 and 1:10.95 when he won the Grade 1 Stephen Foster Handicap at Churchill Downs last June ,and fractions of 46.59 and ... |
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Greece looks to Canada for energy investment
 Sun News Network | Greece looks to Canada for energy investment Sun News Network Greece hopes that by mid-2013 a seismic survey will help determine its offshore natural gas deposits, estimated to be large enough to generate $600 billion in government royalties over 25 years. Avramopoulos says he sees opportunities in mining and ... |
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Urbi's Greek-Like Distress Captivating Greylock: Mexico Credit
Urbi's Greek-Like Distress Captivating Greylock: Mexico Credit Bloomberg The rout in Mexican homebuilder bonds is luring distressed-debt investors including Greylock Capital Management who say the yields on the securities are too attractive to pass up. Urbi Desarrollos Urbanos SAB's $300 million of dollar notes due in 2020 ... |
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Can it happen in Nigeria as Greece sends ex-mayor to life jail
 P.M. News | Can it happen in Nigeria as Greece sends ex-mayor to life jail P.M. News A court in Thessaloniki, northern Greece, on Wednesday handed life sentences to the city's ex-mayor and two other municipal officials in a decade-long embezzlement case, local officials said. Vassilis Papageorgopoulos, left being escorted to prison ... Greek Ex-Mayor Gets Life in Prison for Embezzlement Former Mayor of Thessaloniki sentenced to life imprisonment in Greece Thessaloniki Ex-Mayor Gets Life for Embezzlement |
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Greek far-right party teaches its version of history to children, despite outcry
ATHENS, Greece - Greece's extreme right-wing Golden Dawn party has defended its decision to give Greek history lessons to primary school children at one of its offices.
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Greek ex-mayor jailed for life
A former mayor of Greece's second city Thessaloniki and two other ex-officials are jailed for life for embezzling almost 18m euros in public funds.
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CONASON: While Republicans Warn Against 'Greece,' That Is Exactly Where ...
CONASON: While Republicans Warn Against 'Greece,' That Is Exactly Where ... Green Valley News Indebted America is in danger of turning into destitute Greece, or so congressional Republicans and conservative commentators have been warning us for years now. For many reasons, this is an absurd comparison -- but it may not always be quite so ... |
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Greek government promises extra funds for struggling sports
 Kathimerini | Greek government promises extra funds for struggling sports Kathimerini The Greek government has pledged to revise blanket cuts in funding for sport and allocate an extra 11 million euros to stop some beleaguered federations from closing down. Rowing was one of the sports that would benefit, officials said. Last month ... |
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Bank of England women doing sterling work to keep our money safe
Old Lady of Threadneedle Street still has strong male bias, but more key roles going to capable female hands
The Bank of England might be known as the old lady of Threadneedle Street – but she has a very masculine face.
From the Bank's governor Sir Mervyn King and his three deputies, to the nine-strong monetary policy committee that sets interest rates and the new 11-strong financial policy committee charged with avoiding another blow up in the banking system – all the posts are held by men.
The Bank's court of directors, whose job is to manage the bank, is just a tad more enlightened – there is a woman among the 12 grandees who meet seven times a year. Just one.
But the Bank is keen to dispel any suggestions that it is a crusty old gentleman's club, pointing out that nearly a third of middle and senior management jobs at the Bank are now held by women – up 50% on a decade ago.
In the financial stability unit – whose job is to ensure there will never be a repeat of the 2008 financial crash – two of the six divisional heads are women. .
The Bank is aware of its image problem. A women's network was set up in 2007 and Sarah Breeden, now one of the two bosses in financial stability, was asked to take a role co-chairing the network. The other divisional head is Victoria Saporta, who runs the 30-strong prudential policy division and is an expert in the amount of capital big banks should be forced to hold.
Breeden, 44, is now head of the Bank's risk assessment division, charged with looking for the unknown unknowns – the ticking time bombs outside the banking industry that no one has considered might be a problem.
She is new to this job, previously held by Niki Anderson, 42, who is also one of the Bank's most senior executives and is now a special adviser on financial stability.
All three are long-standing employees of the Bank and played key roles during the banking crisis. Greek-born Saporta, 43, returned from a year-long maternity leave just days before the first signs of the 2007 credit crunch – which sparked the run on Northern Rock – and went on to become a key figure in devising the amount of capital banks should hold. She was seconded to the Cabinet Office when the G20 was held in London in 2009.
Breeden was hand-picked by the governor to run the team that tackled the Northern Rock crisis while Anderson's role was to work out which banks and building societies might fail next.
"It was unrelenting, for about six months," she recalls. "It was every single weekend. If we weren't trying to get more information about what would happen, we had to write systemic impact reports. We became BlackBerry junkies overnight."
She was on the fateful conference call in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers was allowed to collapse rather than be rescued by Barclays.
Coming up through the ranks is Lauren Anderson, an American lawyer who joined the Bank in 2011 after working on US bank failures and is now a senior manager in the special resolution unit, whose job is to devise plans to ensure that if and when banks fail in the future they do not bring down the financial system with them.
"It is the most interesting work," she says. "When things go terribly wrong, we're the ones who go in and fix it and make sure people have access to their money on a Monday morning. That's a pretty amazing job to have."
Breeden, who has been at the Bank since 1991, admits that she asked for 24 hours to think before accepting the job when the governor personally asked her to take charge of the team involved in Northern Rock .
"I wanted to make sure that I knew what the job involved. I knew it was important and I didn't want to mess it up," says Breeden, who ended up working on the Northern Rock crisis for five months until it was nationalised five years ago this month.
She then took a month off with her husband and two children, now seven and 10, before coming back to develop what was to become the special liquidity scheme, a kind of emergency slush fund for banks, and later helped devise the new regulatory regime, which will see the Bank once again policing the insurance and banking businesses.
The banking crisis meant long and intense working hours, but Niki Anderson said the experience has had a long-lasting effect. "I work 50% more effectively," she says.
When she started at the bank, King was chief economist and keen for information on inflation expectations, so she devised a model which uses government bond yield curves – an indication of a price a government pays to borrow – to measure inflation expectations. Twice she has been tempted away from the Bank, once to work for a hedge fund and then for an investment bank.
"I wasn't sure if my career was going to anywhere. I perceived a bit of a glass ceiling," she says. But she returned both times, admitting that the private sector was not as rewarding.
This is also what keeps Breeden at the bank. "What we do ... matters. The judgments that we make and the analysis we do really matter for everybody out there," she says.
They could earn more in the City. Saporta is aware of this as manager of a 30-strong department: "What keeps them here is a commitment to public policy. You have to keep them motivated given there is a big opportunity cost in staying on."
Women made up 43% of graduates recruited into permanent jobs at the Bank last year, up from 29% in 2011, and the Bank recently won an award for the public-sector employer doing the most to create a pipeline of female leaders of the future.
King's successor – Bank of Canada boss Mark Carney – takes over from him in the summer and will serve for five years. Time enough, possibly, for the old lady to find a female face?
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Former mayor of Greece's 2nd city, local officials sentenced to life for ...
P.M. News | Former mayor of Greece's 2nd city, local officials sentenced to life for ... Washington Post THESSALONIKI, Greece — The former mayor of Greece's second-largest city and two former top municipal officials were sentenced to life in prison Wednesday, after a court convicted them of embezzling more than €17 million ($22 million) in city funds. Can it happen in Nigeria as Greece sends ex-mayor to life jail Greek Ex-Mayor Gets Life in Prison for Embezzlement Former Mayor of Thessaloniki sentenced to life imprisonment in Greece |
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Greek Ex-Mayor Gets Life in Prison for Embezzlement
 The Republic | Greek Ex-Mayor Gets Life in Prison for Embezzlement New York Times ATHENS — The former mayor of Greece's second city, Salonika, and two of his top aides were sentenced to life in jail on Wednesday after being found guilty of embezzling almost 18 million euros, or $23.5 million, in state funds — a rare conviction in ... Greek former mayor gets life for embezzlement Greek ex-mayor sentenced to life imprisonment for 17.9-mln-euro embezzlement Former Greek mayor gets life sentence for embezzlement |
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Panic in Greek pharmacies as hundreds of medicines run short
Pharmaceutical companies accused of cutting supplies because of low profits and unpaid bills
Greece is facing a serious shortage of medicines amid claims that pharmaceutical multinationals have halted shipments to the country because of the economic crisis and concerns that the drugs will be exported by middlemen because prices are higher in other European countries.
Hundreds of drugs are in short supply and the situation is getting worse, according to the Greek drug regulator. The government has drawn up a list of more than 50 pharmaceutical companies it accuses of halting or planning to halt supplies because of low prices in the country.
More than 200 medicinal products are affected, including treatments for arthritis, hepatitis C and hypertension, cholesterol-lowering agents, antipsychotics, antibiotics, anaesthetics and immunomodulators used to treat bowel disease.
Separately, it was announced on Tuesday that the Swiss Red Cross was slashing its supply of donor blood to Greece because it had not paid its bills on time.
Chemists in Athens describe chaotic scenes with desperate customers going from pharmacy to pharmacy to look for prescription drugs that hospitals could no longer dispense.
The government list includes some of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, such as Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, GlaxoSmithKline and AstraZeneca. Pfizer, Roche and Sanofi all said a few products had been withheld. GSK and AstraZeneca denied the claims.
"Companies are ceasing these supplies because Greece is not profitable for them and they are worried that their products will be exported by traders to other richer countries through parallel trade as Greece has the lowest medicine prices in Europe," said Professor Yannis Tountas, the president of the Greek drug regulator, the National Organisation for Medicines.
The regulator has investigated 13 pharmaceutical companies that have reduced supplies and has handed the names of eight to the ministry of health so they can be fined. Tountas did not disclose the names of the companies, saying this was the responsibility of the ministry of health, but added that they were "big multinational companies".
The body representing pharmacists, the Panhellenic Pharmaceutical Association, confirmed the shortages. "I would say supplies are down by 90%," said Dimitris Karageorgiou, its secretary general. "The companies are ensuring that they come in dribs and drabs to avoid prosecution. Everyone is really frightened. Customers tell me they are afraid [about] losing access to medication altogether." He said many also worried insurance coverage would dry up.
"Around 300 drugs are in very short supply and they include innovative drugs, medications for cancer patients and people suffering from clinical depression," said Karageorgiou. "It's a disgrace. The government is panic-stricken and the multinationals only think about themselves and the issue of parallel trade because wholesalers can legally sell them to other European nations at a higher price."
The Hellenic Association of Pharmaceutical Companies said the picture was more nuanced. Its president, Frouzis Konstantinos, said there were "probably a very few companies" that were not supplying the Greek market, and only for very specific products — "the reasons being a combination of Greece's low medicine prices and unpaid debt by the state", he said.
In Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece's second city, chemists say they are often overwhelmed by people desperately trying to find life-saving drugs. Oscillating between fury and despair, the customers beseech pharmacists to hand over medications that they frequently do not have in stock.
"Lines will form in the early morning or late at night when you're on duty," said Karageorgiou, who is based in Thessaloniki. "And when the drugs aren't available, which is often the case, people get very aggressive. I'm on duty tonight and know there will be screaming and shouting but in the circumstances I also understand. We have reached a tragic point."
Greece's social insurance funds and hospitals owe pharmaceutical companies about €1.9bn (£1.6bn), a debt going back to 2011, with companies expecting payments of €500m this month.
Some companies admitted they were not supplying some medicines. According to the government list, Pfizer had not supplied or would not be supplying 16 medicines. A company spokesperson disagreed with the total but confirmed four medicines had been withdrawn "because alternatives were available and because of the parallel trade [reselling] situation in the country". The products are the two leukaemia treatments Zavedos and Aracytin, which were withdrawn last year, and the analgesic Neurontin and the epilepsy therapy Epanutin, which were withdrawn last month.
Roche stressed it had not halted supplies of medicines to Greece, but said it had withheld supplies to public hospitals that owed the company €200m. Daniel Grotsky, a spokesman, said: "We are insisting that they [the public hospitals] fulfil their contracts and this is something we do in any country … We are withholding [medicines] until they meet their obligations."
Roche could not say how many hospitals were affected but said it was still supplying public hospitals with "critical medicines", which included treatments for HIV and transplantation. Grotsky said patients could still get their medicines through pharmacies.
Angeliki Angeli, spokeswoman for Sanofi Greece, said it was supplying public hospitals with medicines considered life-saving, unique or irreplaceable. "Non-unique products are supplied based on hospitals' outstanding obligations and overdue status," she said. Non-unique products are medicines for which either a generic exists or a therapeutic alternative option is recommended by treatment guidelines.
She said most Sanofi medicines on the government list remained available on the market with the "exception of a couple of dosages/forms where alternatives exist".
GSK Greece said it had never halted the supply of any product in the Greek market. "This is a joint decision taken not only at local level but also at corporate level. Equally, GSK has maintained the uninterrupted supply [to] Greek public hospitals with all its products irrespective of the accumulated debts," the company said.
Vanessa Rhodes, of AstraZeneca, said the company had not halted the supply of any of its medicines to Greece. "Our priority is to ensure patients have access to the medicines they need. Furthermore, we have an emergency 'direct–to-pharmacy' supply system in place should pharmacies find themselves out of stock of any of our products."
Zeta Chatziantoniou, of Boehringer Ingelheim in Greece, stressed it "has not halted any of its medicine supplies in Greece in the retail sector and in the public sector". Novartis said it was not halting supplies to Greece.
The pharmaceutical industry says many shortages are because of products being exported through parallel trade, and has urged the government to address set drug prices. Under EU trade rules, the free movement of goods is allowed. So for example, while a pharmaceutical company may sell a medicine to a wholesaler or pharmacist in Greece, the wholesaler or pharmacist can sell these medicines on to wholesalers in other countries. Parallel traders do this to make money on the price differences between countries.
"The government needs to correct these wrong prices to avoid a surge of exportation. Greece's drug prices are 20% or more lower than the lowest prices in Europe," said Konstantinos, who is also the general manager of Novartis in Greece.
The industry wants the health ministry to bring in a new pricing system so that Greece uses a basket of eurozone countries to calculate prices. At present, medicines are priced at below the average of the three lowest prices in 22 EU countries.
The regulator has introduced export bans for nearly 60 medicines to try to tackle the problem and is looking at 300 more products. It is also investigating 10 wholesalers and 260 pharmacists who it believes have broken the export ban. The ministry of health will decide any punishment, which is likely to be fines ranging from €2,000 to €20,000, said Tountas.
This month will be crucial as Greek officials and Greece's creditors – the European commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank – must agree the 2013 public pharmaceutical budget, which has fallen in recent years. More cuts would put patients at a "critical level", said Tountas, who will be one of the key players at the negotiating table. The budget was €3.7bn in 2011 and fell to €2.44bn last year. Tountas is concerned creditors may cut it to €2bn for 2013.
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Yavuz Baydar: Merkel's Visit to Turkey Marks a Positive Change of Mind
Does this mean that the German chancellor comes closer to CDU heavyweights who have been vocally pro-Turkish membership, such as Ruprecht Polenz, Chariman of the Bundestag's Committee on Foreign Affairs, and gets ready to be challenged by others within?
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Greece government increases sport funding
 Aljazeera.com | Greece government increases sport funding Aljazeera.com Last month, world championship silver medallists Nikos and Apostolos Gountoulas quit the sport, complaining that elite athletes could no longer afford to compete for Greece because of funding cuts. The budget for Olympic sports federations has been ... |
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Turkey-Greece Business Forum to be held in Istanbul
Turkey-Greece Business Forum to be held in Istanbul www.worldbulletin.net Foreign Economic Relations Board (DEIK) will organize Turkey-Greece Business Forum in Istanbul on March 4. Turkey-Greece Business Forum will be held under coordination of the Ministry of Economy and in cooperation with Turkish Exporters' Assembly ... |
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Greek government makes extraordinary and undemocratic attacks on free speech
Greek government makes extraordinary and undemocratic attacks on free speech New Statesman In the wake of revelations such as the alleged torture of detained anarchists and the crackdown against activists in Skouries (Northern Greece), the Greek government and especially New Democracy has decided to use the “rule of law” in order to tighten ... |
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This Exists: Greek Yogurt for Men
 TIME | This Exists: Greek Yogurt for Men TIME That's how one company is getting men to eat more of the stuff — a strained, thicker-textured version of the common breakfast staple, which is rich in protein so it keeps you feeling satiated longer. “Powerful” is a fat-free, eight-ounce serving of ... |
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Greek man pleads guilty New York Dali theft
Greek man pleads guilty New York Dali theft Oakland Press NEW YORK (AP) — A Greek man has admitted to stealing a Salvador Dali painting from a New York City gallery, only to return it in the mail. Phivos Istavrioglou pleaded guilty on Tuesday following his arrest in the theft of a work titled "Cartel de Don ... |
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Greek Bank Lending Continues to Contract in January
Greek Bank Lending Continues to Contract in January Wall Street Journal ATHENS--Net bank lending to Greek businesses and households in January shrank 4% compared with the same period last year, as demand for bank loans continued to slide, data released by the Bank of Greece Wednesday show. The decline was in line ... |
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Greek former mayor gets life for embezzlement
Greek former mayor gets life for embezzlement MiamiHerald.com THESSALONIKI, Greece -- A court in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki has convicted three of the city's former top officials, including a former mayor, and sentenced them to life imprisonment for embezzling more than (EURO)17 million from the ... Thessaloniki Ex-Mayor Gets Life for Embezzlement |
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Greek former mayor, local officials sentenced to life for embezzlement
THESSALONIKI, Greece - A court in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki has convicted three of the city's former top officials, including a former mayor, and sentenced them to life imprisonment for embezzling more than €17 million from the municipality.
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