Demonstraties in Europa: Griekenland. #2

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 12:54 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

Nou, ga in discussie met het NRC of Centraal Planbureau.

quote:

Europe holiday overview
Finland and France make provision for a statutory minimum of 30 days’ holiday a year for employees, closely followed by Lithuania and Russia (28), the UK (28), Poland (26) and Greece (25). The vast majority of countries have a statutory minimum of 20 days including Germany, Belgium, Cyprus, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands. Cyprus and Slovakia (15 days) have the most bank holidays in Europe followed by Malta and Spain (14 days) and then Lithuania, Austria, Portugal and Slovenia (13 days). France, Poland, Finland, Germany and Belgium have 10, while Denmark, Romania and Ireland have 9. With 8 bank holidays a year, the UK and Netherlands have the least in Europe. However, in some European states such as Norway and Switzerland, public holidays can be nullified if they fall on a weekend.

Overall, including the statutory minimum and public holidays, employees in Lithuania are potentially entitled to the greatest amount of paid leave in Europe with 41 days’ holiday per year. France, Finland and Russia rank second with 40 days, followed by Austria and Malta (38), Greece (37) and Sweden, Spain and the UK (36). Employees in Italy have 31 while those in Germany, Romania and Belgium have 30. Employees in Ireland and the Netherlands have the least amount of holiday at 29 and 28 days, respectively. If employers provide 8 bank holidays on top of the statutory minimum, UK employees would receive 36 days’ paid holiday a year, one of the most generous in Europe.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 12:51 schreef betyar het volgende:

[..]

In dat onderzoekje met gemiddeld 31 vakantiedagen is ook bullshit, Nederland telt gemiddeld 25 vakantiedagen.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:01 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

NRC heeft het over verlof-dagen, leugenaar.
Bijzonder verlof, ziekte verlof,....

quote:

Het aantal verlofdagen voor de Nederlandse werknemer (31 vakantiedagen en 8 feestdagen) ligt boven het Europees gemiddelde van circa 34 dagen.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:06 schreef betyar het volgende:

[..]

[..]

Waar lees jij die?

quote:

Het wettelijke aantal vakantiedagen per jaar is 4 keer uw aantal werkdagen per week. Bij een volledige baan heeft u dus minimaal recht op 20 vakantiedagen per jaar

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:10 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

http://www.rijksoverheid.(...)en-heb-ik-recht.html

[..]

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:12 schreef betyar het volgende:

[..]

Hoe komt NRC dan aan 31 vakantiedagen?

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 12:54 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

Nou, ga in discussie met het NRC of Centraal Planbureau.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:13 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

Ik zei toch:

[..]

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:14 schreef betyar het volgende:

[..]

Publiceer die onzin dan niet als jezelf al twijfelt.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:21 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

Ik twijfelde niet, dat deed jij.

Er staat misschien een foutje in de tekst, maar de conclusie blijft hetzelfde.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:26 schreef betyar het volgende:

[..]

Nee, er klopt geen hol van.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 12:54 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

Nou, ga in discussie met het NRC of Centraal Planbureau.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:14 schreef betyar het volgende:

[..]

Publiceer die onzin dan niet als jezelf al twijfelt.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:39 schreef Ronnie_bravo het volgende:

[..]

Jij bent toch de knip en plaksmurf.....

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:46 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:
Overigens is 20 het wettelijk minimum aantal vakantiedagen, en zou 31 het gemiddelde kunnen zijn.

quote:

In Denemarken en Groot-Brittannië hebben vaders twee weken vaderverlof, in Finland achttien dagen en in Portugal twintig

quote:

In Noorwegen en Denemarken en Duitsland krijg je een jaar lang de tijd doorbetaald om te kunnen ontzwangeren Zelfs de Britse moeders krijgen een half jaar de tijd. In Nederland zullen wij het echter moeten doen met een kortere periode, ouderschapsverlof en vakantiedagen.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:57 schreef betyar het volgende:
Maar goed, ik denk dat mijn punt wel duidelijk is.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 14:05 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

Ja, je blijft volhouden dat Grieken lui zijn.

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 14:05 schreef Papierversnipperaar het volgende:

[..]

Ja, je blijft volhouden dat Grieken lui zijn.

quote:

Greece's cut-price potato movement shows Greeks chipping in

Greeks are pulling together and forging innovative new social and economic models to help those hit hardest by the debt crisis

Spyros Gkelis, a smart and hard-working biology lecturer from Thessaloniki, saw it like this. "If someone shoves you," he said, "you know, like really pushes you, hard, in the street, so it hurts, your first reaction is to lash out. Strike back. But if that doesn't achieve anything, if they keep pushing, and it keeps hurting, you think again. Try something else. Work out some way of dealing with it."

In their fifth year of recession, with 21% of the workforce jobless, salaries slashed, one in 11 people in greater Athens using soup kitchens and half the country's most prescribed medicines now in short supply, that is what more and more Greeks are doing. Faced with a half-broken state, and systems and structures only making things worse, people are doing things differently.

In a clearing on a hillside above the second city, Elisabet Tsitsopoulou found herself buying five 25kg sacks of potatoes, for herself and her neighbours, from the back of a lorry. She paid ¤0.25 a kilo, against the 60-70 cents she would pay in the shops. The farmer she bought from, Apostolos Kasapis, was equally happy: he got his money straight away, rather than having to wait up to a year – or forever – for a middleman's cheque.

"It benefits everyone," said Christos Kamenides, professor of agricultural marketing at Thessaloniki University, of the producer-to-consumer system he has helped perfect. The potato movement was launched last month and is spreading across Greece, incorporating other staples such as onions, rice, flour, olives and – at the last count – more than 4,000 Easter lambs. Town halls announce a sale; locals say how much they'll buy; farmers show up with it in 25-tonne trucks. Everyone's happy.

With many Greeks now taking home 30% less than before the crisis, but prices of plenty of products still impossibly high, the movement is a clever and, for many, vital way to cut costs that is of practical help to both parties to the transaction. There is anecdotal evidence, too, that supermarket prices are starting to fall, certainly on direct sale days, in response to it.

In several parts of the country, small volunteer shops are setting up, often on the initiative of local councils, selling produce at barely more than cost price – the margin is marked on the pack – in member-only schemes, to avoid tax and legal problems. Kamenides is developing a broader scheme along these lines. His "unified co-operative" will unite producers and consumers and may eventually serve as an economic model for buying and selling essential foodstuffs.

A couple of hours south, in the port of Volos, an alternative economic model is already up and running. More than 800 townsfolk have signed up for a local currency scheme called TEMs. Teachers, doctors, babysitters, a bookkeeper, farmers and smallholders, a decorator, hairdresser, seamstress and a lawyer are among the members. In the past couple of weeks Theodoros Mavridis, a local electrician, has not had to pay a euro for his eggs, tsipourou (the local brandy), fruit, olives, olive oil, jam, soap, and help in filling out his tax return.

Maria Choupis, a founder member, said up to 15 such networks are active. Members transfer units into and out of each others' accounts online. To ensure the currency works hard, these can hold a limit of 1,200 TEMs, and cannot be more than ¤300 overdrawn. For Bernhardt Koppold, an alternative therapist, the scheme is easier and more direct but also "a way of showing practical solidarity". Choupis agrees it's "as much social as economic". That's a point that recurs frequently. There is, among many Greeks, still intense anger at what they are living through, as well as almost complete disillusionment with politicians, not to say politics. But in Choupis's words, many are "moving beyond anger": instead of lashing out, coming together.

In Volos, a waiter in the taverna by the ferry terminal, told me that "in the years of cheap money and easy credit, we just lost sight of what matters, you know? It's sad that it's taken a crisis to do it, but we're rediscovering our values."

People are helping each other in small, informal ways. Teachers and parents' associations "come together, gather food and discreetly arrange to allocate it to families in the school who are suffering", said Victoria Pakrete, an Athens teacher who herself volunteers in a soup kitchen. Marie Le Du said that in the northern Athens suburb where her mother lives, women from the local Orthodox church "work in pairs. They visit two or three families that are 'their' families, drop in for a coffee and a chat to catch up – and discreetly hand over a parcel of donated food, as part of the visit, to preserve the family's dignity."

Others are more organised. Reveka Papadopoulos, head of Médecins Sans Frontières Greece, said that in the past year she had seen "some really encouraging, exciting things. People are seeing the power of organising themselves, of helping themselves, and each other. It's wonderful to see … it keeps you going."

So in Thessaloniki, the National Theatre of Northern Greece is about to launch a season of plays by Genet, Pinter, Albee and Greek authors under the banner Social Theatreshop.

Theatregoers will pay for their tickets with food, which the theatre's 300 staff – actors, technicians, administrators, all working on the project for free – are distributing among charities and welfare groups in the city.

"We are, everyone knows it, in a very bad situation," said the deputy artistic director, Giannis Rigas. "We thought, we have to do something for people who now have so little money that they are going hungry. But this isn't charity, it's a fair exchange: food for theatre. A couple of tins of soup, or a packet of pasta, for a ticket. And it's also a way to put the theatre back where it belongs, in the community."

Across town, on the redecorated first floor of a battered building owned by a trades union association, more than 80 doctors and dentists volunteer their time at the social medical centre, opened late last year to treat illegal immigrants with no access to free healthcare.

In fact, 70% of the patients seen by the GPs and specialists at the centre until 9pm each night are Greek citizens who can no longer afford health insurance.

"If you're not earning, you no longer have easy access to care," said Sofie Georgiadou, a dentist who volunteers one evening a fortnight. "I never imagined I would one day find myself working somewhere like this, in Greece."

It doesn't, in some instances, take much to change things. In Athens, Xenia Papastavrou, fed up with the quantities of perfectly good bread going to waste in restaurants and bakeries when welfare groups were spending money elsewhere to buy it, has founded a network called Boroume that, via its website, now puts 70 commercial food donors – including Greece's largest bakery chain and 25 Athens hotels – in contact with 400 welfare groups, from elderly people's homes and orphanages to drop-in centres for the homeless and municipal soup kitchens. Similarly Silia Vitoratou, a statistician, joined with friends in December to set up Tutorpool, whose site now puts 500 volunteer tutors in contact with pupils who need their help. It is a fact of Greek life that most schoolchildren, especially those hoping to go to university, will at some stage need after-school tutoring; many parents can no longer afford the private tuition centres that for decades have met that demand.

Tutorpool is helping Vassilis Xanthopoulos, 11, who is dyslexic and has had extra private tuition since he was very young.

"Last year, we had to stop," said Harris, his father. "My business has practically collapsed, and my wife is earning half what she used to. It was ¤450 a month we no longer had. Vassilis started falling behind almost instantly. Tutorpool really saved us."

Warming as they are, though, such initiatives can't save everyone. Korina Hatzinikolaou is a developmental psychologist at the Athens Institute of Children's Health, which co-ordinates Greece's child healthcare provision.

Her salary has been cut by a third and hasn't been paid since December; she and her two small sons have had to move back in with her mother.

More alarmingly, the institute itself can no longer make ends meet and is threatened with closure; Greece's national neo-natal screening programme, among others the institute runs, is now at risk.

"There are limits to what ordinary people can do," Hatzinakolaou said.

"We can do much, but we cannot run a health system. At some point, a state has to say, 'You know what? This really matters. Let's all do it, together. Let's make it a priority.' But here in Greece, the social state is collapsing. I am really not sure how it will end."

quote:

Greek crisis: precarious funding pushes health and social services to extremes

Use of volunteers and donations at state-funded refugee centre and psychiatric hospital reveal impact of low cash and high debts

As the volunteers unpack their shopping bags of rice, milk and cooking oil, Goman Badder retreats to the room he lives in with his wife and their one-year-old son. For the 28-year-old Syrian Kurd, the deliveries are a mixed blessing: he is relieved that his family will not go hungry, but humiliated that it has come to this. He had hoped for better things for his son, asleep on the neatly made bed.

"When I left Syria, I felt I didn't want him to be like me," he says. "But I never thought for him it would be like this: people bringing him Pampers and milk. If I'd known it would be like this I would never have brought him to this world."

His friend Salah Muhamed, a Kurdish teacher who fled the "hell" of Syria six months ago, did not mince his words. "In Syria, we will be killed by guns," he says. "Here, we will be killed by the economy."

For the past six months, this state-funded centre for asylum seekers has received no funding from the state. Its 25 staff members have not been paid since January. Due to its debts, the centre has "huge problems" with suppliers and the usual food deliveries stopped two weeks ago.

Some of the 225 residents thought the staff had gone on strike over pay but, as director Vasilis Lyritzis explains, they could simply not go on: "We just stopped cooking because we didn't have anything to cook. The moment that we have food, we cook again."

Even now, the inhabitants of the Lavrio centre, about 40 miles from Athens, are among the most fortunate of Greece's tens of thousands of asylum seekers, most of whom receive no support from the state and sleep rough in large, unsanitary slums in cities such as Athens.

But, as the debt crisis takes its toll on state services and the unpaid bills to suppliers mount up, Badder and Muhamed are being pushed to the extremes. And they are not the only ones. Across the country, some of Greece's most marginalised and vulnerable people who rely directly or indirectly on the state to feed them are now facing the possibility of having to turn to their neighbours for help.

On the island of Leros in the Dodeccanese, the governor of a psychiatric hospital has, in the past two weeks, like Lyritzis, found himself having to plead with suppliers to keep bringing food, despite an almost complete inability to pay them. Yiannis Antartis's suppliers stopped for a week, after which he found enough money to pay them each ¤15,000 (£12,000) – enough to encourage them to restart but far from enough to cover the hospital's total debts to them of ¤1.25m.

Antartis believes he has about a month to find money to pay the debts and protect the 400 patients, who have a range of mental illnesses, from depression to dementia and schizophrenia. Owed about ¤13m by its debt-ridden health insurance funds, the hospital, which is already sending samples to private labs for want of sufficient facilities, will soon be struggling for the basics, he said.

"If we don't receive money within three to five weeks we're going to have a real problem – for food, for medicines, for hospital supplies, bandages, even the basics," he says. "All levels of the hospital are going to start breaking down.

"My primary concern is to receive enough money to pay some outstanding bills in order to keep the hospital going, from the insurance funds, from the state, from wherever, just to be able to keep the hospital going. I am really worried about the fact that the hospital will not be able to function normally if we don't receive payment."

His position will be met with sympathy by the director of a state hospice in the Kypseli neighbourhood of Athens, who said last week that, as well as medicine shortages and an inability to pay energy bills, the institution had had no meat or chicken since 1 June.

Antartis has been the hospital's governor on and off since the 1980s, when it was revealed to be keeping patients naked and chained to their beds. He is adamant the institution bears no semblance to its former self. In 1988, he says, 1,600 patients were "piled up" in wards and looked after by fewer staff than today. Now, 120 of the 400 patients live relatively normal lives outside the hospital.

But, last week, Antartis was so concerned about supplies that he wrote to the health ministry and major political parties warning that patients were being poorly fed. Since then, he has managed to get the supplies coming in again and has met Greece's caretaker health minister, who, he says, showed understanding and promised a ¤150,000 payment by the end of June.

"But he [the minister] emphasised that the insurance funds do not have any money and that the hospitals have to keep every penny in order to keep going," Antartis says. Given the size of the debts and the interest rates on them, ¤150,000 "doesn't cover anything".

The inability of health insurance funds to pay their debts has caused chaos in the healthcare system, contributing to a shortage of medicines and the closure of dozens of commercial pharmacies.

Antartis is relieved the hospital managed to resolve – albeit temporarily – the problem with food supplies without the patients realising anything was wrong. But he remains concerned, particularly about medical supplies, as that is one area in which Leros's community, as active and kind as it is, will not be able to help. "I think the local people will help with food," he says. "But even that is going to be a problem at some point because for how long are they going to be able to help?"

One place where Greeks have reportedly already stepped in to fill the gap left by the state is Corinth, where the prison has had food shortages and people have started collecting goods for the inmates. Another is Lavrio, where donations have been keeping food on the table for the asylum seekers and refugees, among whom Lyritzis estimates there are 75-80 children. Some of the volunteers are hardly well-off themselves: Nadia, one of the members of a people's assembly from Athens which dropped off food at the weekend, is on Greece's new unemployment benefit of ¤360 a month and has had to go back to live with her mother.

"¤40 or ¤50 just means I won't go out for a couple of days," she shrugs, loading bags of groceries into a waiting car.

Lyritzis, an employee of the Hellenic Red Cross which runs the centre, says the finance ministry has been unable to tell him when, or if, its funding might come. He says the centre had an estimated five days of food supplies left and he is in a very bad psychological state.

For Badder, who came to Greece in 2010 after alleged persecution due to his Kurdish ethnicity, that would be good news.

But if the situation is not alleviated, he would like to see the responsibility for his centre fall to a power outside Greece. He says: "The Greek people are very, very good. They look after us. But the Greeks have no money. Why must the Greeks bring us food? We are in Europe, not just Greece."

As the volunteers busied themselves in the courtyard, unpacking tins, toiletries and cartons of milk, he says: "The people here are so nice. We can't tell them: 'Don't bring food because we are ashamed'. We must say 'Thank you'. But we feel bad."

quote:

Grieken plunderen massaal bankrekeningen

Grieken hebben in de afgelopen dagen massaal geld van hun bankrekeningen gehaald. Ze zijn bang dat de financiële instellingen omvallen als anti-Europese partijen zondag de verkiezingen winnen en Griekenland terugtrekken uit de euro.


Volgens bankiers zagen de grote banken dagelijks 500 tot 800 miljoen euro aan tegoeden verdwijnen. Bij kleine banken werd 10 tot 30 miljoen euro weggehaald.

Dat geld werd deels contant opgenomen, overgeboekt of doorgesluisd naar valutabeleggingen. Ook werd het geld gestoken in Duitse en Amerikaanse staatsobligaties en obligaties van de Europese Investeringsbank.

Winkeliers signaleerden hamstergedrag bij de Griekse bevolking. Vooral pasta en ingeblikte etenswaar vonden gretig aftrek.

quote:

Greek police block riot police in anti-austerity protest

(Reuters) - Greek police protesting against austerity cuts blocked the entrance to the riot police headquarters on Thursday, preventing buses carrying riot police from leaving for the site of major demonstrations this weekend.


Scuffles broke out as riot police tried to clear the entrance of several dozen police union members - many in uniform - chanting anti-austerity slogans and holding banners.

"They would not let riot police buses depart for Thessaloniki," a police official said, referring to the northern city hosting a weekend trade fair where anti-austerity demonstrations are planned.

Some riot police appeared reluctant to tackle uniformed officers. "They make us fight against our own brothers," said one riot policeman who declined to be named.

The government plans to slash police pay in a new round of spending cuts worth nearly 12 billion euros over the next two years. The savings plan is expected to provoke new street protests in the coming weeks by austerity-weary Greeks fed up with repeated wage and pension cuts.

Police, firefighters and coast guard officers plan to hold a separate protest later on Thursday in central Athens.

^{(Reporting by Yannis Behrakis and Tatiana Fragou, writing by Deepa Babington, editing by Tim Pearce)}

quote:

Op dinsdag 6 maart 2012 13:56 schreef betyar het volgende:

[..]

En dan heb je gemiddeld 11 bovenwettelijke? Heb je de verlofdagen in andere landen meegenomen? Nemen we voor de aardigheid even het vaderverlof Nederland telt daar wel twee hele dagen vooruit los van de geboortedag (maar ja je bent veelal aan het werk) en de dag om je kind aan te geven. Nemen we even wat andere landen:

[..]

Zwangerschapsverlof voor mama is hier 16 weken,

[..]

Wat nu bijzonder verlof?

quote:

Primary Greek tax evaders are the professional classes

Greece is riddled with corruption, but a study shows that banks, politicians and professional workers are largely to blame

There is one good reason for Greece to stay in the euro: to combat corruption. It is a sad fact that the country is riddled with it and needs outside pressure and support to sort things out. Athens is not the only place in Europe wrestling with corruption, but we'll come to that later.

Even if Greece and its prime minister, Antonis Samaras, could overcome the huge loss of pride and reap some of the economic benefits of quitting the single currency, they would still be left with a corrupt economy, much of which strengthens the power of unions and trade associations.

City economists tend to ignore the problem when they assess the pros and cons of euro membership. They have arrived at the collective opinion that leaving the eurozone is the best, if not the only, option for Athens. Central to the argument is that an independent drachma would immediately be devalued, making Greek exports more competitive and at a stroke wiping out many, if not all, of the country's debts.

There is also a political dimension that is centre stage at the moment, following proposals for closer union and control from Brussels and, in Greece's case, by the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Yet these economists ignore the challenges that beset a nation where very few people pay their taxes, where public-sector jobs are secured through family ties and where contracts for work, public or private, are rarely signed without someone in a position of power asking for a backhander.

Greek banks are at the centre of the problem, as in Italy and Spain, where bankers perpetuate all the worst corrupt practices.

Martin Sandbu, chief leader writer on economics at the Financial Times, recently chided the southern Europeans for not jumping at the chance to join a European banking union. He argued that the loss of control over a crucial pillar of the economy to a higher EU authority was worth it when set against the chance to end the insidious and corrupt relationship between bankers, politicians and the professional classes, which had so far proved impossible to break.

It may seem conspiratorial to argue that corruption is at the heart of the Greek malaise, but it is one of the main reasons Berlin is adamant Athens has had all the help it is going to get, without some evidence the cuts are going through. For German politicians, cuts to sacred state subsidies and increases in tax revenues are a crude indicator that corruption is being tackled, however tentatively.

Supporting the view that Greece is beyond helping itself, an in-depth study of how Greek banks, politicians and professional workers behave was published last week by two economists from the Booth school of business at the University of Chicago and a Greek academic based at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

Interestingly, their report, Tax Evasion Across Industries: Soft Credit Evidence From Greece, which documents the hidden, non-taxed economy, blames the current malaise not on dodgy taxi drivers or moonlighting refuse collectors, but on the professional classes.

They found that ¤28bn (£22.4bn) of tax was evaded in 2009 by self-employed people alone.

As GDP that year was ¤235bn and the total tax base was just ¤98bn, it is clear that this was a significant sum. At a tax rate of 40%, it amounted to almost half the country's budget deficit in 2008, and 31% in 2009.

The chief offenders are professionals in medicine, engineering, education, accounting, financial services and law. Among the self-employed documented in the report are accountants, dentists, lawyers, doctors, personal tutors and independent financial advisers.

The authors, Adair Morse and Margarita Tsoutsoura from the Booth school of business and Nikolaos Artavanis from Virginia Tech, were given unprecedented access to the records of one of the top 10 Greek banks. They found that, when professionals approached the bank for a loan or mortgage, their tax returns showed their debts almost exceeded their incomes ( debt payments ate up 82% of their incomes). For the beleaguered tax authority, this meant their income was too low to qualify for income tax.

On average, they found the true income of self-employed people to be 1.92 times their reported income. Under generally accepted loan criteria, home ownership figure than the UK (80% versus 68%).

customers would need to show that their debts, after their mortgage payments were taken into consideration, were less than 30% of their income.

Of course, several countries lost control of banking regulation in the runup to the financial crash, including the UK, Ireland and Spain. But it is noticeable that the two countries that have so far done the least about the corrupt relationship between banks and their customers – Greece and Spain – are the two countries in the worst trouble.

Unlike Ireland, which has exposed a wealth of corrupt practices, Spain continues to hide the extent of its bad loans, especially to property developers who are friends of the bank chiefs who sanctioned their loans.

To emphasise the global scale of the problem, the authors point out that World Bank studies show that 52% of corporations worldwide hide some of their income from the tax authorities, and 36% of European companies do so. Corruption is everywhere as companies and individuals seek to preserve their status, incomes and standard of living.

Brussels, while enforcing strict rules on Athens, has struggled to contain the rampant corruption that infects its own business and farming subsidies. With that in mind, it may seem a bit rich to lecture the Greeks, but an appreciation of paradox has never been the eurocracy's strong point.

The Greeks have begun to crack down on tax evasion. Only this weekend, raids on 11 people found tens of millions of euros' worth of undeclared property and assets in New York, London and various offshore tax havens.

The Greek finance ministry's financial crimes unit conducted the raids, and says it has many other groups in its sights.

However, broader attempts to crack down on the professions were blocked last year by the Greek parliament. MPs voted against a bill mandating tax audits on people who had incomes below a minimum threshold. The bill targeted 11 professions, including vets, architects, engineers, economists, doctors, lawyers and accountants.

The authors found, almost as an aside to their central examination of tax evasion, that the occupations represented in parliament "are very much those that evade tax, even beyond lawyers".

They said: "Half of non-lawyer parliamentarians are in the top three tax-evading industries, and nearly a super-majority in the top four evading industries."