July 2, 2010
Greeks pay average of €1,671 per bribe for public services: costs nation €800 million a year
Article by Valentina Pop at the eurobserver with some ugly publicity for the Greek public sector:
"...a transparency watchdog has estimated that the cost of bribes paid out by Greek citizens for public and private services is at least €800 million a year.
"Corruption is one of the main reasons why we have this economic crisis in Greece. It's not the only one, but it's a very important one," Aris Syngros, head of Transparency International's office in Greece, said on Thursday (1 July) during a hearing in the European Parliament.
He presented the results of a survey carried out in the second half of 2009 which puts the cost of day-to-day corruption between €717 million and €857 million, an increase by some €40 million compared to results published a year before.
The calculation is based on telephone interviews with a sample of 6,122 individuals, carried out between July and December 2009.
The survey shows that the public sector in Greece is the most prone to corruption, with 9.3 percent of households reporting that they were asked to pay a bribe in order to speed up administrative processes, get fair treatment in hospitals or avoid a penalty for traffic offences. The average bribe paid in 2009 for public services was €1,355."
Corruption throughout the EU is the impetus for creating even more power structures to combat it. That bribery has long been a standard by which many mediterranean countries are able to get anything done has a long history, and having the northern european countries implement a mechanism to fight it will only make it mutate, because it seems hard to believe that it can be forced out of so many cultures where its long been the accepted way of doing business.
"...The EU executive is now looking at ways to extend monitoring of anti-corruption efforts in all member states, as government and private corruption scandals ranging from defence contracts in Portugal to companies such as Siemens and Volkswagen continue to pop up, with Transparency International noting a worsening of the corruption perception in most EU countries."
Greece's Golden Visa program
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