[An Nahar] Crisis-hit Greece is still losing billions of euros (dollars) to corruption in spite of efforts to stamp out graft and maximize the state's tax revenue, a report said on Wednesday.The Ta Nea newspaper said that tax evasion cost Greece 13 billion euros ($17.4 billion) annually in lost revenue, citing remarks by experts and state officials at a conference on corruption on Tuesday.
| A country that has been practicing tax evasion for the last three millennia is suddenly going to start paying its taxes? |
Another 40 percent is commonly written off and the remaining 40 percent is pocketed by the tax official in charge of the procedure, Spinellis said.
And when the state is called upon to repay tax, 10 percent of the sum is similarly embezzled by corrupt officials, the head of investigations at Greece's anti-fraud squad (SDOE) Nikos Lekkas told the conference.
Lekkas added that a bank transparency law adopted in 1995 had been applied only last year.
Earlier this month, the international anti-graft watchdog Transparency International maintained a poor sleaze score on Greece, awarding it 80th place on a list of 182 countries worldwide.
Greece's shadow economy is believed to represent around a third of the official economy, which is mired in a deep recession as the government struggles to apply a tough economic overhaul supervised by its international creditors, the European Union
...the successor to the Holy Roman Empire, only without the Hapsburgs and the nifty uniforms and the dancing...
and the International Monetary Fund.
Ta Nea added that a much-touted parallel drive publicly to identify state debtors had so far yielded insignificant results, with most of the businessmen locked away by police employing legal loopholes to evade imprisonment.
Some of them had already filed for bankruptcy, thereby preventing the state from seizing their assets.
"We locked away 17 people who owe 5.6 million euros but only the sum of 50,000 euros was paid," a SDOE source told Ta Nea.
Overall, the state has been able to collect 5.1 million euros from expected gains of 41 billion euros, the daily said.