Postcard: Naming and shaming tax evaders in Greece

My wife calls them the Ninja turtles. They are the most visible sign that the Prime Minister George Papandreou is trying to turn Greece into the Denmark of the Mediterranean and, heaven forbid, a law-abiding nation.

Clad in body armor and helmets and tooled up to the eyeballs, the ninjas ride around the streets and suburbs of Athens in pairs, on powerful motorbikes with blue lights constantly flashing. They advertise their presence and you have to be either blind or congenitally stupid to miss them.

Each bike has a pillion passenger constantly scanning the sidewalks for some myopic miscreant to punish. Teenage moped riders who fail to wear helmets so as not to spoil their hairstyles find themselves surrounded by mobile swat teams and handed a ticket. No more double parking for two minutes to nip into a kebab shop. The ninjas will get you. Zero tolerance is the rule of the day.

Crackdown on tax officers

The government says these patrols are designed to reverse Athens' crime wave. Yet the cynic in me suspects that this new exuberant form of policing is designed to provide an easy source of revenue for the impoverished state. But can Greeks trust the state with their money?

Malcolm Brabant questions the Greek government's motivations

Clearly, the finance ministry thinks not. It has launched an inquiry into the activities of 31 tax offices, 10 customs agencies as well as other revenue collecting centers. The allegations include bribery, illegal economic activity, forged documentation, smuggling, negligence and corruption.

Twenty tax office directors are being replaced, for what the ministry euphemistically calls "failing to meet collection targets."

It also discovered that 70 finance ministry employees had property holdings ranging from 800,000 to three million euros - rather excessive considering their relatively low civil servants' salaries.

Nearly 250 finance ministry employees failed to even file tax returns for the year 2007 - 2008.

Just a token gesture?

No doubt these financial crimes suspects are suffering nervous breakdowns at being fingered. But at least their identities have so far been kept secret - unlike 57 doctors who were recently named and shamed for being tax cheats.

A friend of mine at a top Athenian hospital where many doctors fail to pay their taxes said her colleagues went through the lists published in the newspapers and laughed.

"Who are these people?” one doctor said. "They are nobodies. The authorities haven't gone after the big names. This is just a token gesture."

And that is a fair point. Are the ninja turtles and tax crackdowns just a fleeting display of toughness designed to appease the hawks of the IMF and the eurozone? Or is zero tolerance here to stay?

Greeks are now being encouraged to inform on their neighbors and other suspects. There's a lot of score settling in the name of upholding the law. As an outsider who appreciates the rebellious nature of this country, authoritarian Greece is not particularly charming.

Author: Malcolm Brabant
Editor: Sabina Casagrande