Journalist Arrested In Greece For Publishing List of Possible Tax-Evaders 344
kyriacos writes "The Greek government is charging journalist Kostas Vaxevanis with violation of the data privacy law for publishing a list of about 2,000 Greeks who hold accounts with the HSBC bank in Switzerland. While more and more austerity measures are being taken against the people of Greece, there is still no investigation of tax evasion for the people on this list by the government. The list has been in the possession of the Greek government since 2010."
Get out of Greece now. (Score:3, Interesting)
If you're in Greece and don't already have your money out of the country, you're an idiot. This isn't about taxes. It's about Greece threatening to leave the euro area, switch to a local currency (bring back the drachma!), and printing money to get out of their financial disaster. People in Greece, as EU residents, have no obligation to participate in this. The EU encourages cross-border banking. So everybody with any significant cash is moving it to German, French, or Swiss banks in case the axe falls.
Tax records (Score:5, Interesting)
Tax records are public documents in Finland. In fact, they are published as an annual bestseller (two pieces of information are listed: the reported annual income and the total tax).
The logic is the same as with court records. The citizens need to be able to trust that the tax system treats everybody fairly.
The same thing happened in the US (Score:0, Interesting)
Obama promised they would go after big tax cheats if they only knew who they were.
Obama promised whistle-blowers would be protected - even paid a reward.
In 2 seperate well documented cases, people working on computers in Swiss banks copied and provided huge lists of US plutocrats including many congressmen, former presidents and law enforcement personel. In some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars had been deposited in accounts of people who only officially make $120K a year.
So were these guys protected and paid a reward by the Obama administration?
Of course not - they were chased around the world like Osama and then dissappeared into solitary confinement without lawyers like enemy combatants.
That's the truth about corruption at the very highest levels in all the major countries, by all the major parties.
Government is organized crime.
Ah, dodgy Switzerland (Score:5, Interesting)
Hey many billions -- nay, TRILLIONS -- of dollars have wealthy individuals from around the globe hidden in Swiss bank accounts?
Under any other circumstances, nations would ban trade with Switzerland unless it shared bank account data with their local tax office. Alas, it's the same fat cats that run our countries who shield their wealth in Switzerland.
It was eye opening when that disgruntled IT fellow burned a copy of bank account data onto a couple of DVD's and then embarked on a global tour of selling to each country a list of their citizens who had money stashed in Switzerland.
Is he still alive?
Re:Get out of Greece now. (Score:2, Interesting)
Local currencies are bad how, exactly? It seems that participating in the euro has brought forced austerity measures and foreigners dictating local policy, wages, benefits, etc. When somebody else controls your money, it matters rather little who runs your government.
I mean, it's not like, to dip into recent history, the ex leaders of Iraq and Libya suddenly became bad guys. They were bad guys for years and we didn't care, other than the occasional one sided ass whipping they got once in a while. Now, when they decided to make moves that would make them independent of the US dollar, all of the sudden THEN they become problems worth dealing with.
That doesn't matter, though, because while I'd love to blame that on Fox News, which is deserving of so much condemnation, the fact is that no US news source with a mass following reports on these things. So you end up with a population ignorant of why the rest of the world hates us, which is susceptible to such claptrap as "the terrorists hate us for our freedom" and other such nonsense like that. It really is all about money, and the banksters don't care who gets trampled on as long as they win. Watch what's going to happen in Greece if they seriously get someone in charge who really has the potential and the willingness to leave the euro.
Re:Tax records (Score:2, Interesting)
No, it's not obvious. Because why would you be posting a question like that on an English-language, US-based tech site instead of a political forum that has least something to do with Finland. Or just find a penpal or something.
Re:Get out of Greece now. (Score:2, Interesting)
Their debts are enumerated in euros so they have to pay them back in euros.
They simply state "All debts will be paid back with Drachma. If you don't like that, let us know, and we'll cancel our debt with you." People would sign up to take the drachma, if the alternative was nothing. One or two would hold out, and Greece would default on those, and nobody would care, because the people who refused to take the offered drachma would be blamed.
OR some of those hedge funds would follow recent example http://www.businessinsider.com/hedge-fund-elliott-capital-management-seizes-ara-libertad-ship-owned-by-argentina-2012-10 [businessinsider.com] and use courts in exceptionally corruptible countries to win judgements and seize mobile property of the Greek government to force full payment.
That fixes nothing (Score:1, Interesting)
Euro zone is profitable, it has a surplus.
" Even if there were only two countries in the Euro one of the two would have the same basic problem that greece has - they're forcibly less competitive than the other one, and they aren't getting enough payments out of it."
Giving them separate currencies doesn't fix any imbalance. Because you can't deflate one currency against the other indefinitely without a flight of capital to the more stable currency. No capital means the deflating countries declines at a faster rate. You've simply made things worse.
The fix is to fix the imbalance in the economy. That does not mean that Greece needs to be as successful as Germany, it means that they need to stop LIVING like they're as successful as Germany.
"Aside from the fact that british did that for 250 year and are still doing it and their country hasn't imploded"
Britains last trade surplus with the EU was in 2000, their biggest problem right now is the Euro (also came in 2000), it's no longer necessary to lend to the UK in loans that repay in GBP. This is why Bank of England has been buying treasuries via 'quantitative easing' BECAUSE OTHER COUNTRIES DON'T WANT THEM.
However if you want to look over the longer term, fair enough. Hows the empire doing? Good?