Jew World Order

The mall is a sizeable place – two glossy floors, perhaps 20 shops, several
thousand square feet. In it, at 3pm on Friday, I counted a total of 11
people.

Nobody is buying anything. Nobody is selling anything. No bank is lending
anyone money. The normal processes of commerce have slowed down or stopped.
And even the election campaign isn’t stirring the passions you’d expect.

“From Monday, Greece is going to start working again,” orated Alexis
Tsipras, the leader of hard-left Syriza, at his final rally in Omonia Square
last week. “The bankrupt memorandum [EU bailout agreement] becomes the
past. On Sunday, with your vote in your hand, you are going to change your
life. We can change the course of history!”

In elections past, they would have been rammed into the square, and down
Pireos, Athinas and Stadhiou, the avenues leading off it, as far as you
could see. Now, a thin covering of the faithful, perhaps two or three
thousand, spread in front of the platform, trickling a short distance down
Athinas.

Next day’s rally nearby by New Democracy, the main pro-bailout party, was the
same. It looked all right on TV, but only after a man with a loud hailer
circulated, urging the crowd to move in front of the cameras.

“This is a choice between the euro and the drachma,” New Democracy’s
leader, Antonis Samaras, told them. “We’re going to get out of the
crisis, not of the euro… Sunday’s is not a usual election. Whatever is
gambled on Sunday cannot be undone.”

It’s a message being pushed by the whole of the Greek political establishment.
Voting against the German-funded bailout deal, which imposes crippling
spending cuts but without which Greece cannot pay its debts, “risks
losing everything the country has gained in the last fifty years”, says
Vasilis Rapanos, president of the national bank. The right-wing tabloids
accuse “Cool Alexis”, as they’ve mockingly christened Tsipras, of “drachma
nostalgia” and “hymns to the drachma”.

But opposite the deserted designer mall is another building which shows why
the election may not, in the end, alter Greece’s fate, whoever wins: the
headquarters of the NDOE, the tax investigation unit.

The fact is that even if Greece does continue to receive its bailout money, it
still might go bankrupt. Tax revenues have collapsed in the last six months,
leaving the country around €600 million short of revenue targets for the
period and facing a shortfall of almost €2 billion in total.

Partly, of course, that is because austerity has crushed the economy: the
German approach, putting cuts before reform, is to blame here. Partly it is
a symptom of the general paralysis afflicting the Greek government. But the
frustrations of the tax investigators also stand as testament to how little
Greece and Greeks seem to be genuinely committed to the structural reforms
needed to make their state sustainable in the future.

Tax evasion, a national pastime, has got worse, not better, since the crisis,
according to one of the senior NDOE officials, Nikos Lekkas. “The job
has become a lot more difficult,” he says.

Of Greece’s five million taxpayers, just 33 last year declared an income of
more than £750,000. Fewer than 300 declared an income between £400,000 and
£750,000. Higher taxes required by the crisis mean that even businesses
which paid up before have started hiding money to keep going.

When Nikos Maitos, one of Lekkas’s investigators, went to the hard-pressed
island of Naxos to look for tax evaders, a local radio station broadcast his
car registration number to warn residents. Banks have obstructed 5,000
requests for data on rich suspected avoiders, Lekkas said. “They delay
sending information for 8 to 12 months,” he says. “And when they
do, they send huge stacks of documentation to make it confusing. By the time
we can follow up, much of the money has already fled.”

Even though there has been a crackdown on some high-profile evaders, with
arrests and even the odd jail sentence, the results have not been everything
the inspectors hoped for. One of the people Lekkas’s staff arrested – Leon
Levi, the owner of fitness firm BodyLine – was sentenced to three years in
jail for owing about €620,000. But he was allowed to avoid prison by paying
€10 a day for the duration of his sentence: a bargain-basement €11,000.

Perhaps the most telling group of all, however, are the 500 or so politicians
and former politicians who Lekkas is investigating: a number, incidentally,
excluding current MPs, who are immune. Prosecutors are currently trying to
get the immunity of one particular MP, Dora Bakoyannis, lifted, accusing her
of involvement in the illegal transfer of $1 million by her husband to a
London bank account to avoid tax. (She denies the claims, saying they are “politically-motivated.”)

In today’s election, Mrs Bakoyannis is the number one candidate on the
all-Greece electoral list for New Democracy. If even the people supposed to
be implementing the reform plan are accused of dodging their taxes, that may
tell you much of what you need to know about the memorandum’s prospects of
success.

Though New Democracy’s Mr Samaras now presents himself as the saviour of the
bailout programme, he arguably bears as much responsibility as anyone for
the plight Greece now finds herself in. Not just as the leader of one of the
old parties who helped spend the country into the mess – but specifically
for his actions during the earlier part of the crisis itself.

Back in 2010, Greece’s reforms – the promises it made in the memorandum –
began well. There was strong public support for cracking down on tax
avoidance, corruption and the jobs-for-votes culture that created Europe’s
most bloated public sector. But the drive soon fell victim to party
politics.

Mr Samaras, then leader of the opposition, denounced the package, scoring well
in opinion polls and weakening the government’s ability to deliver it. Asked
last summer by EU leaders to back the bailout, he refused, demanding tax
cuts instead – which would have increased Greece’s deficit even more.
Progress on reform stalled.

When the government of the socialist prime minister, George Papandreou,
finally collapsed last autumn, Mr Samaras, shocked at threats that Greece
would be expelled from the euro, performed a 180-degree turn, joining a
national unity government to implement the memorandum. Even then, however,
he made an important misstep. It was Samaras who pushed for early elections,
last month, believing his New Democracy would win. Instead came the shock
second place for Syriza, the collapse of New Democracy and the socialists
and the intensification of the crisis.

If Syriza does win today, and does immediately repudiate the memorandum, what
follows looks fairly clear. Without the spending cuts, the German bailout
money stops. Greece’s banking system, also dependent on EU funds, collapses.
Even before then, as soon as next week, withdrawals from Greek banks could
accelerate from today’s slow-motion “bank jog” into a full-scale
run. Greece would indeed be forced back to the drachma, which would
immediately crash against the euro by up to 75 per cent.

Syriza’s case is that Germany is bluffing. Spain’s bailout last weekend – on
nothing like the same austerity terms – has encouraged those who say that
Greece, too, can strike a similar deal. As Tsipras put it on Thursday: “Spain
can be in Europe without a memorandum. Why can’t Greece?”

But Spain is different. Its problems were caused by individuals’ overspending,
not the state’s. It already has made significant cuts. And what’s
fascinating, too, has been the relatively desultory effort by the rest of
Europe to boost the pro-bailout forces at today’s election. If European
leaders wanted Athens to stay in the euro that badly, you’d expect them to
have offered a few more concessions that Mr Samaras could have waved at his
voters, or to have started more energetic condemnations of Syriza. But
they’ve done neither.

Greeks may be now underestimating how much the focus of the EU’s attention is
shifting away from them, and towards Madrid. They may be overestimating how
much the EU is really committed to Greece.

“There’s a feeling in the northern states of Europe that Greece is never
going to reform or keep its promises, whoever wins on Sunday,” says one
Athens-based diplomat from a northern EU country. “There’s a growing
feeling that Greece is likely to be out of the euro eventually, whoever wins.”

Since last month’s election, Syriza’s support has almost doubled. But New
Democracy has risen, too. “There seems to be a consolidation going on
around the two parties,” says a New Democracy MP, Manolis Kefaloyannis. “I
do think we will win, narrowly.” The polls, both public and private,
seem to agree. But nobody should imagine that Greece’s, or Europe’s,
troubles will be over.