Bribery & Corruption the Greek Way

“You first parents of the human race….who ruined yourself for an apple, what might you have done for a truffled turkey?”
Brillat Savarin
French Epicure &Gastronome

Bribery and corruption is as old as the hills. In fact after prostitution, it is the second oldest profession. Aristotle may be the founding father of ethics but the Greeks are certainly not fanatical when it comes to acting in an ethical way. Cynical pragmatism and extreme self-interest rather than idealism and absolute considerations of virtue, guides their actions. If by virtue however we rely on the ancient Greek meaning of the word “arête”, meaning excellence or being good at something, a relative rather than a moralistic term, then the Greeks are virtuous in that they excel at bribery. They have turned the nefarious art of bribery into a course in business efficiency. They have made it a vocation.

According to a recent survey conducted by the Greek Chapter of Transparency International, Greeks paid an estimated 748 million Euros or
R 9, 5 billion in bribes in 2008. It reported that sixty percent of these bribes were paid at public hospitals, tax offices, the transport department and land planning offices. It appears that most of the money went to pay corrupt tax officials with an average payment of 2 362 Euros as opposed to average payments of 222 Euros at the transport department. These figures probably exclude the millions in bribes paid by industrialists, ship owners and Greek businessmen to ministers and leading politicians in both the conservative ruling party and the socialist opposition party.

The unruly freedom loving Greeks dislike authority and believe that the rules do not apply to them. In fact they do their level best to undermine most attempts to govern them. They hate paying taxes as much as they hate standing in queues. The devious Greeks lead the field in Europe when it comes to economic delinquency and tax evasion with the Italians coming a close second. In Greece tax evasion has replaced gambling, fornicating and complaining as the national sport. Part of the problem may lie in the ingrained belief that the state is corrupt and politicians are and always have been corrupt. They will find ways to steal tax-payers money. Why become complicit and reward them by paying taxes?

It may also have something to do with the psyche of the Greeks and their Roman neighbours. You get a heightened sense of rampant individualism and unrestrained egotism to the point where it becomes a psychopathy. In this moral wasteland this “me first” culture mutates into extreme atomism, the word Greeks use to describe a person or individual as an indivisible entity in its own right. The ancient Greeks however also used the word “idiotes” hence “idiot” to describe a private individual who lacks a community spirit. They knew that co-operation is the glue that holds society together.

There is strict compliance and monitoring when it comes to collecting basic sales tax yet absolute chaos when it comes to everything else. God forbid you buy a spanakopita or a cheese pie from a street vendor and he doesn’t print and give you a sales receipt. If caught by a roving inspector, both the seller and the buyer are heavily fined.

The Greek ministry of economics and finance at one stage had to look at innovative ways to recover unpaid taxes. It discovered that some high net worth individuals were reporting huge losses and paying very little personal tax yet they were living in magnificent villas with five toilets. So after a quick crash course in how to spot toilet evasion, tax inspectors were converted into toilet inspectors and a toilet tax was imposed. Greece is not alone here. Sweden has a bathroom tax. Shower friendly South Africa on the other hand, is going the other way. Under President Jacob Zuma, showers will become tax-free and crime free zones. Shower installations are water-wise and considered essential communal recreation structures so in future they will be a tax deductible expense.

In Greece, instead of paying your own taxes why not cut a deal and grease the palms of a sympathetic and needy tax official. Yiannis the tax official has a stay at home wife and three hungry children who are eating him out of home and pension. He needs some extra cash to complete the renovations at his summer cottage in his father’s village. Along comes Spiros, the plumber who knows somebody who knows Yiannis. Spiros meets Yiannis at an ice-cream kiosk on the far side of Athens where nobody knows them and reports his neighbour Petros.

Petros owns a souvlaki joint on a busy plateia in the Plaka district where he does a roaring trade until the early hours of the morning. In these troubled credit starved times it’s a rare and valuable commodity. It’s a cash business. His customers include taxi-drivers, students, policemen, off-duty prostitutes, politicians and night-club performers. Although Petros lives in a modest two bedroom apartment with only one toilet in an unfashionable suburb of Athens, he cannot resist buying the new 325i BMW cabriolet. This hubris and offence against Nemesis, the goddess of fallen heroes leads to his downfall. The shiny new black BMW catches the eye of the envious Spiros. One night Petros and Spiros share some mezethes. They get drunk on ouzo and Petros confides in his neighbour and tells him that he has huge piles of cash stashed away at the bottom of his cupboard because he doesn’t trust the banks.

The older Greeks know that there are two things that are difficult to conceal, and that is great wealth and a cough. Since ancient times, the Greeks have envied the good fortune of others. They have a remarkable aptitude for spiteful resentment, pettiness, back-stabbing and treachery. In this they may be no different to other great nations. Also the Greeks are suspicious by nature. They have always been suspicious of any mortal excess, be it great talent, great beauty and great wealth. Besides it’s best to keep ones head down and temper ones ambition lest one invokes the wrath of Nemesis, provoking her to unleash swift retribution and vengeance.

Spiros tells Yiannis the tax official about the cash that Petros is hoarding. In return Spiros gets a special tax rebate and now has the spare cash to buy his mistress Soula that gold baby Rolex that she has always craved. Spiros will also install Yiannis’ new Hans Grohe, multi-nozzle shower, free of charge in his summer cottage in the village.

Yiannis the tax official pays Petros a visit at his souvlaki joint in the Plaka. Yiannis tells Petros that he knows about his stash of cash. Petros gives Yiannis an envelope with 5000 Euros in it in return for his silence and co-operation. As an added incentive Petros throws in free souvlaki pita with all the trimmings and extra chips for a year for Yiannis, his wife Katinoula and his three obese children.

Until recently Greece did not have a comprehensive peri-urban and outlying areas development plan nor a proper computerised title deeds filing and registry system. The funds allocated by the EU for this purpose disappeared. For unscrupulous property developers this presented many fertile opportunities to plunder. If you wanted to build on land that was not zoned for urban or residential development you had several choices open to you. You could set alight and burn vast tracts of magnificent pine trees that once graced the land and protected it from future development. You then bribe an official at your local land planning office to declare the land now suitable for development. Then you bring in the concrete mixer trucks at midnight and pour foundations and slabs under headlights. The next morning it is a fait accomplit. The trees have been replaced by concrete. In this way even sidewalks, public beaches and mountain sides have been developed. Greece is full of such illegal buildings and structures making it a very upmarket favela in some areas.

At public hospitals in Greece you pay hospital orderlies so that you are not left lying on a bed in the corridor or worse on a stretcher in the basement next to the boiler. Worse can also happen. You might be sent to theatre and get a hysterectomy instead of an appendectomy. Now that might not sound too bad but it’s a major problem especially if you’re a male patient. In the private hospitals you give envelopes to the doctor and the nurses to ensure that you get better treatment. I too am guilty of bribing or “incentivizing” nurses and doctors for their utmost consideration. My father was dying of cancer and he was in great pain. I objected at first telling my father that it was their job, they had taken the Hippocratic Oath and owed their patients a duty of care. He replied that I was too pure and high minded. He said that it was only money. How do you refuse a dying man his last wishes?

My own experiences with the transport department in Athens made me flee Greece on the first out-bound flight and I have been in self-imposed exile for almost a decade. I paid a visit to the nearest transport department in a suburb of Athens shortly after my father died. All I wanted to do was to transfer ownership of my father’s car into my mother’s name. I walked into a dirty grey concrete building that stank of urine and stale tobacco. The walls were painted a pale fading green. I was confronted with numerous counters and several queues of wailing women and despairing men. Everyone was clutching sheaves of paper, waving them frantically in the air, at each other and shouting for no apparent reason. It looked like the trading floor of an old Bombay spice auction.

Eventually it was my turn and I approached the counter with much trepidation and a nauseous sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Before me stood a sour faced snarling unshaven lout with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. He thrust a photocopied piece of paper at me listing twenty or so requirements that had to be complied with before the transfer of ownership could take place. Death certificates, identity documents, passports, affidavits, registration papers, tax certificates etc. He shouted at me, I shouted at him and I left cursing him, his family, his country, his thieving brigand ancestors, the Turkish blood in his veins, vowing never to return. I stormed out of the building and noticed several seedy looking touts with tight trousers and droopy moustaches loitering on the pavement outside. They looked like anorexic pimps. One of them slithered next to me and gave me a slant eyed hyena smile and offered to ‘facilitate’ any transaction with the officials inside the building for a small fee. He pointed to a small office on the opposite side of the street that specialised in dealing with such matters. Then I noticed that there were rows of similar transport ‘liaison’ or assistance bureaus. 200 Euros for the bureau and a further 200 Euros for the appropriate official inside and the matter would be expedited with a minimum of fuss, bother or supporting documentation. I could not afford to stay in Greece for a minute longer so the matter was handed to the family attorney who dealt with the matter after shuffling many papers and a considerable delay lasting all of two years. It would have been easier, cheaper and considerably more satisfying to set the car alight outside the transport department, with the offensive bureaucrat strapped to the roof rack and buy my mother a new car.

There are many issues to consider. Where did it all start? How did the Greeks become like this? How did this immoral impulse or instinct evolve? Are their actions immoral or simply amoral? Is it a case of selective morality or a complete lack of moral conscience? Why do Swedes and Norwegians not behave like this? Then there’s the slippery slope argument. What happens to a society when we all behave this way? Greece today has crippling public debt that stands at almost 92% of GDP. This lack of fiscal discipline may ultimately cost Greece its economic sovereignty as the EU considers measures to place Greece under a strict rehabilitation programme along with the three other misbehaving European member states collectively called ‘PIGS’ by Brussels Eurocrats, (Portugal, Italy, Greece & Spain).

When did the Greeks lose their sense of morality? Or maybe the question should rather be; ‘how can you lose something which you didn’t have in the first place?’ As with many things we look to history for the origins of the problem. The malaise and rot probably started in ancient Greece where they understood the art of the possible and expediency in all matters not just politics. For instance, it is a little known fact that one of the building blocks of Athenian democracy was the right to cruise for whores. Solon, the Archon of Athens, overwhelmed by an egalitarian impulse decreed that prostitutes should be available to everybody so he used state-funding to subsidize brothels. The sex-trade boomed. Fast forward 2400 years and nothing has changed. State funding is being used to pay for the defence of our very own sex machine and paragon of virtue, Comrade Jacob Zuma.

We turn to the Sophists who were our early advocates or hired guns known for their verbal and linguistic skills. You paid them to argue your case in the agora or some other public forum and they used their formidable skill at oratory coupled with sophisticated and elaborate arguments often devoid of the truth to present a favourable case.

On this hallowed ground then of solid foundations, ruined temples and compromised morality, the practice of bribing public officials for favours continued and became refined when Greece became a Roman colony. The Romans being of similar ilk aided and abetted the Greeks in their illicit endeavours, exchanged information and shared bribery techniques and tips. It also helps of course to blame someone else for our flaws, woes and vices. And here our traditional mortal enemy the Turks come in handy.

The reluctance of many of the older generation of Greeks to display their wealth is the legacy of living under Turkish rule for four hundred years. During this time the Greeks were heavily taxed by the Sultans Beys and tax collectors. From Persian Imperialism, the Ottoman Turks and their sultans inherited a love for shuffling papers, filling in forms, a huge bureaucracy and a comprehensive tax administration to fund a huge empire. This led to the depopulation of Athens as the anarchic and individualistic Greeks fled to the mountains and the countryside to avoid the yoke and stifling control of the oppressor. People lived like bandits and fugitives in caves far from the prying eyes of the Sultan’s spies. Even the church went underground to avoid harassment and persecution. The Greeks had to rely on a combination of stealth, their native intuition and cunning to survive. They became experts at concealment and deceit. They did their best to lie low and attract as little attention to themselves as possible. They did everything they could to hide the little wealth they possessed. They also became masters of complaining and feigned subservience and relished in their new-found role as miserable wretches so that they could keep the attentions of the curious Turks at bay. The wealthy traders and money-lenders however, who needed to stay in the city and conduct business simply bribed the very amenable Turkish officials, all the way up to the top echelons of the Sultan’s palace.

Death and taxes are supposed to be the only two certain things in life or so the saying goes. As we have seen not necessarily true in Greece when it comes to paying taxes. Transparency International omits to mention the payment of bribes to priests. So even in death if your family properly “incentivizes” the priest officiating at your funeral, he will wear his more elaborate and ornate ruby studded cross instead of the plain one he wears every day and he will also add a few extra verses to his prayer for the benefit of the soul of the deceased. Here too I speak of experience.

No frontier has escaped the attentions of the wily Greeks. The Space Exploration Agency of the European Commission wanted to send the first European into space. The CEO of the Space Agency asked for applications from interested parties and their costing projections.
An English astronaut asked the agency for 1 million Euros to do the job.
The French astronaut asked for 2 million Euros to do the job.
The Greek applicant, a taxi-driver from Kolonaki asked for 3 million Euros.
When he was asked by the CEO of the agency why three million Euros, he replied: one million Euros for you, one million Euros for me and one million Euros to send the stupid Englishman into space.

Costas Ayiotis
Pavement Philosopher
Pretoria
2 March 2009