Greece Outside In: 07/15/13

Monday, July 15, 2013

Greeks launch strikes ahead of key parliament vote

Strikes by various public sector workers have begun in Greece ahead of a key vote in parliament that would see the first job cuts due to austerity measures. The cuts are part of conditions for an international bailout.

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Sofia Vergara and Nick Loeb Kiss While on Vacation in Greece?See the PDA Pic!

GossipCenter.com

Sofia Vergara and Nick Loeb Kiss While on Vacation in Greece—See the PDA Pic!
Eonline.com
Sofia Vergara and beau Nick Loeb are getting hot and heavy in Greece! While on vacation in Mykonos with friends over the past weekend, the cute couple was snapped sharing a kiss yesterday during a tender PDA moment. In the pic, Vergara flaunts her ...
Sofia Vergara Wears Revealing Black Cutout Swimsuit, Hugs Fiance in GreeceUs Magazine
Sofia Vergara Hits the Beach in Greece to "Mix Work and Pleasure"PopSugar.com
Sofia Vergara's Swimsuit Makes Greece Sizzle!PerezHilton.com
GossipCenter.com -Huffington Post -Just Jared
all 12 news articles »

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Greek Parliament to Vote on Charging Ex-Minister

Greece's Parliament was set to vote late Monday on whether a former finance minister will face criminal prosecution for his handling of a list of 2,000 wealthy Greeks with Swiss bank accounts.

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More than 2,400 UK bankers paid ?1m-plus, EU regulator says

More bankers were paid in excess of €1m in Britain than in any other EU nation, according to European Banking Authority

The row over bankers' pay has been reignited by data showing that more than 2,400 bankers in the City were paid in excess of €1m (£870,000) in 2011 – more than three times as many as in the rest of the EU put together.

A total of 3,175 bankers across the EU met the regulatory description of "high earners" – taking home more than €1m in salary and bonuses – according to the European Banking Authority, the pan-EU regulator, with 2,436 of them in the UK and 739 spread across the rest of the EU.

The next largest total was in Germany, where 170 received €1m or more for 2011; in France it was 162. In eight countries in the EU, no bankers received more than €1m, although in countries worst hit by the eurozone crisis – such as Cyprus, Greece, Portugal and Ireland – some bankers earned more than €1m.

Pat McFadden, a Labour MP who sits on the Treasury select committee, said: "These figures illustrate the on-going problem with huge salaries in banking at a time of austerity for most people. The problem with pay in banking is not just the high levels but that bonuses are paid out without risks being understood and on the basis of results that don't look so good in the future."

The information about high earners is available to regulators following the introduction of remuneration codes in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The now defunct City regulator, the Financial Services Authority, first began to shed light on pay scales in the City in 2010 when it published data showing that 2,800 bankers received more than £1m in 2009, the first year after the banking crisis.

The EBA will now publish the data on high earners annually as regulators attempt to analyse the way pay deals are structured, particularly as a new bonus cap is introduced across the EU.

The number of high earners was greater in 2010, when 3,435 across the EU received at least €1m – 2,525 of them in the UK. The figures showed a fall in pay between 2010 and 2011 – the average pay of those earning more than €1m in the UK in 2011 was calculated by the EBA as €1.4m, down from €2.3m a year earlier.

The highest average was in Spain, where the banking sector was bailed out by the EU, the 125 paid more than €1m receiving an average of €2.4m in 2011.

Individual bankers earning more than €500,000 face having their bonuses capped at 100% of their salary from 2014, and the new data shows that the City as a whole breaches this cap, paying out €2.7bn in bonuses 2011, which was more than three times as much as was paid in fixed salaries, although this was down on the €5bn – six times salaries – paid out in 2010.

There are expectations that banks may respond to the bonus cap by raising fixed salaries. Nicholas Stretch, of law firm CMS Cameron McKenna, said: "Because London has a very large number of people with variable high pay, the forthcoming bonus capping rules – and extending the number of people caught by the rules – will have a particular impact on our financial services industry and lead to extensive changes in how remuneration is provided."

The UK total of euro millionaire bankers is inflated because it includes those employed by the UK arms of EU banks which have a presence in the City because of its role as a major international financial centre.

Almost three-quarters of the 2,436 who received more than €1m in 2011 were classified as working in investment banking – some 1,809 – while 85 work in retail banking, 182 in asset management and 360 in other business areas.

Unite national officer Dominic Hook said: "There is a huge gap between the highest and lowest paid workers in Britain's financial services industry.

"It is high time that banks addressed this gap. Spreading reward more evenly across the banks would embed a culture of fairness and responsibility."

Jill Treanor

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George Osborne: this economic recovery SUCs

S is for sluggish, U for unemployment and C for credit. Where are the wage rises, exports and business investment?

Reasons to be cheerful – one, two, three. The heatwave (at least, until the moaning kicks in). Sporting victories, from the Lions to Murray to (maybe) the Ashes. Oh, and the recovering economy. Yes, you read that last item correctly. Because it's official: Britain's rubbish economy is no longer quite so terrible. Over the past few weeks, George Osborne has talked again and again of how the UK is "leaving intensive care", "recovering" and other figures of speech aimed at luring the public out from behind their sofas.

You can expect a lot more of this, especially when the GDP figures come out a week on Thursday. Not only will they have a plus sign in front (rather than the minus we're used to), they're likely to show reasonably strong growth – and so provoke a veritable chorus of told-you-sos from coalition ministers.

And where the government goes, so go the press. The Economist occasionally runs an R-index, measuring the number of times newspapers use the word "recession". Self-confessedly rough and ready, it's nonetheless a not-bad gauge of public pessimism. Well, the Guardian's librarians have helped me assemble an alternative R-index, the R this time standing for recovery.

We combed the Times, the Mail and the Guardian for stories using the words "recovery" and "economy" (I omitted the FT, since it's as likely to be talking about a turnaround in Kazakhstan's mining industry as for shops in Kettering) in each month of the year so far.

Our Recovery Index indicated a strong increase in media optimism: the number of articles about economic recovery jumped from 57 in January to 122 in June. And although we undertook the exercise as a bit of a jape, something else about the results stood out: the greatest talking up of a turnaround was in the rightwing papers. Over six months, the Times has seen a 55% increase in economically buoyant articles, as compared to a 43% rise in the Guardian. Perhaps the editors and commentators at the paper of record are dutifully fulfilling their obligations as the broadsheet closest to David Cameron.

Put all this together and you get an idea of what the contours of the next election campaign look like. The coalition, aided by their friends in the press, are going to claim their cuts have worked. Despite all the naysaying from the Two Eds, Cameron will say: "I made the tough decisions and they have largely paid off. Britain is growing again and our overdraft is coming down. Of course, we're not going as fast as hoped – those pesky Greeks saw to that – but seven out of 10 ain't bad."

But a simple fact-check would pull that case to pieces: Britain has had the weakest recovery in decades, worse than the US and than Europe. Borrowing has far overshot Osborne's initial projections, so that the chancellor has broken the only meaningful budgetary target he set himself. Yet the coalition has begun the work of defining down what economic success looks like.

And the worrying part of this thought experiment is that, without drastic changes, Labour will struggle to muster a decent reply. Led by Ed Balls, the opposition has adopted a scorecard approach to judging the coalition's economic policies: is GDP up or down? Does Britain still have its triple-A rating? What's happened to public debt? The criticism of austerity has been bang on but – in focusing on Red Book statistics and market indicators – it has also been narrow and technocratic. That always posed a problem of what Labour would say when the sad music stopped; and that problem is upon the shadow cabinet now.

But if one steps away from whether the quarterly GDP stats come with a plus or a minus, there is plenty to worry about in this half-hearted recovery. Take yesterday's analysis from the TUC picking apart the coalition's claims to have overseen the creation of a million net new jobs and showing that four out of five of them are in low-paid industries: retail, hotel services, social care. The march of the makers has turned into Britons being forced to take up minimum-wage positions staffing cafes and supermarkets. And since 2011, half of all new jobs have come from people going self-employed, where median wages are even lower: under £6 an hour. Far from a Britain of startups and entrepreneurs, Osborne has created what City economist Dhaval Joshi refers to as "an army of underpaid freelancers".

Or look at the Resolution Foundation's research from last week, which takes the official projections for where Britain will be in 2017 and shows that – where interest rates even start heading towards their long-term average – 1.2m households would be in serious "debt peril" spending more than half their income on credit repayments.

If this is a recovery, it's a recovery that SUCs. The S in that acronym stands for sluggish. The U for underemployed, where, as research has shown, half a million people want extra work as their wages aren't covering their outgoings. And the C is for credit, since households with falling real wages are relying on cheap credit carrying on for ever.

There's plenty here for Labour to go at, but it should be generating its own benchmarks for what economic success looks like, drawn from the coalition's own promises. For my money, those criteria would include wage rises, exports and business investment. But it's time to refine the critique of what the coalition is doing; and to point out that while the economy may be out of crisis, it still SUCs.

Aditya Chakrabortty

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Greece's Eurobank completes acquisitions of Postbank, Proton Bank

Greece's Eurobank completes acquisitions of Postbank, Proton Bank
Reuters
ATHENS, July 15 (Reuters) - Greece's fourth-largest lender, Eurobank, completed the acquisitions of New Hellenic Postbank (TT) and Proton Bank from the country's bank rescue fund on Monday, the latest move in the consolidation of the nation's battered ...

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Business Daily

Business Daily - Greek Healthcare in Crisis
BBC News
Greeks have had to learn to live with their financial emergency but recently their economic crisis has become a healthcare crisis as well. Unpaid drug and health insurance bills by the billion have brought the state hospital and drug supply system to ...

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Greece bailout minister's prosecution imminent

by

Maria Kagkelidou

Greece's parliament will most likely ask for the prosecution of the minister in charge of the country's economy in 2010 - when Greece ended up asking for €240bn international bailout- regarding a corruption and tax evasion scandal.

Earlier today, the two former heads of Greece's anti money-laundering operation, Yiannis Kapeleris and Yiannis Diotis, were charged with dereliction of duty for the same case.

George Papaconstantinou, former Finance Minister and one of the architects of Greece's original bailout deal under PM George Papandreou, is accused of acting against the public interest and forging documents.

The case revolves around a list of HSBC depositors in Switzerland, known around Europe as the Falciani list. Falciani was an HSBC employee who allegedly stole the data from his employers. The records eventually found their way into the hands of the French police. The French authorities in turn shared the information with other European governments who used the list to collect tens of millions of euros.

In the summer of 2010, then French finance minister Christine Lagarde who now heads the IMF, passed on the names of 2,000 Greek nationals with deposits at the bank to her Greek counterpart, Papaconstantinou. The documents was christened the Lagarde list in Greece and it was hoped that the Greek government would use the list of wealthy depositors to check against its own tax records and crack down on tax evaders.

But the information was not used until early this year and a single cent has yet to be collected. Numerous versions of events for this lack of action have been presented to the Greek parliament and the country's voters. It is alleged that the names of Papaconstantinou's relatives were included in the list and later removed as well as that Yiannis Diotis one of the former heads of SDOE, Greece's anti money-laundering body, not only failed to take action but also made copies of the confidential information.

Later today, Papaconstantinou, who has repeatedly denied any wrong-doing, will probably become the first former minister in the decades since the collapse of the Greek military junta to be sent to court with the support of MPs from all parties.

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Reworks Will Sound Off In Thessaloniki

Reworks, an international music festival, celebrates its 9th edition from Sept. 20-22 in Thessaloniki, making the city the meeting point for music fans from across the country and abroad as well. Reworks has been a stable and beloved institution in Thessaloniki, which aims to both acknowledge world-renowned artists and support emerging artists from Greece and abroad. Apart from the various high ...