http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_wsite1_1_15/02/2013_483350
( This will be proven to be another lie by 2014.... )
( This will be proven to be another lie by 2014.... )
FinMin pledges new measures will not be needed as Samaras rallies ministers
Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras insisted on Friday the government would not impose any new taxes or wage cuts beyond those already agreed in Greece’s fiscal consolidation program, as Prime Minister Antonis Samaras sought to give his coalition new impetus.
“This is the last time that our citizens will have to carry such a burden,” Stournaras told Parliament. “The Greek government will not take other measures that have to do with wage cuts, pension cuts and tax hikes. From now on, the program focuses on changes that bring about the modernization of the state.”
Stournaras was involved in a brisk exchange with SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras after the latter accused the government of failing to capitalize on the International Monetary Fund’s error in calculating the impact that the Greek austerity measures would have on the economy.
The finance minister hit back, saying Athens had raised the issue with the troika late last year and that he had asked Greece’s lenders this week to give a joint assessment on the matter, which prompted European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn to argue the Greek program had suffered from domestic political instability and implementation problems.
“Of course I believe that the multiplier issue is important and of course I believe that the mistake is not just ours,” Stournaras said in response to Tsipras’s questions. “Clearly, Mr Rehn is mistaken if he believes that the whole recession was a result of just Greece’s mistakes. However, I cannot follow the leap you make from the IMF using an incorrect parameter to having to cancel the whole program and abandon the memorandum.”
Samaras held a rare cabinet meeting on Friday to stress the importance of pushing through structural reforms and improving the absorption of EU structural funds. Former Hania Mayor Kyriakos Virvidakis was appointed deputy development minister to oversee the use of these funds.
Samaras indicated he will begin holding one-on-one meetings with his ministers next week. He will also meet coalition partners Evangelos Venizelos and Fotis Kouvelis on Monday.
In Spain , corruption served up in many forms....
Now A Vast Political Espionage Scandal To Top Off The Sordid Corruption Scandal In Spain
Wolf Richter www.testosteronepit.com www.amazon.com/author/wolfrichter
Spain just can’t catch a break—a horrid economy with dizzying unemployment, collapsing banks, a prime minister and ruling party tarred by corruption.... Now a political espionage scandal blew up, scattering debris and money laundering allegations far and wide.
Unemployment in Spain was 26% in December, youth unemployment 55%. GDP last quarter dropped for the fifth month in a row (-0.7%), the steepest decline since the financial crisis. Consumer spending plunged 10% in December from prior year—following a hike in the value-added tax. And the budget deficit target of 6.3% (not counting the billions plowed into bailing out the banks) is skidding out of reach.
This leitmotif is accompanied by an elegantly escalating corruption scandal that broke in early February. A classic cash-for-contracts arrangement, where senior politicians received secret payments from business folks who in return were awarded juicy government contracts.
It was documented in handwritten ledgers, involved a €22 million slush fund in Switzerland, and was allegedly run by Luis Bárcenas, the ex-treasurer of the conservative People’s Party (PP), the party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, whose name appears repeatedly and very inconveniently on the ledgers as recipient [which put him andChancellor Merkel on the corruption hot seat in Berlin.... The Confidence Crisis In Spain Sends Out Shock Waves].
Add a political espionage scandal. The case blew up in a peculiar manner. According tosources—everything in this case is “according to sources”—Método 3, a detective agency, went out of business not long ago. One of its laid-off employees was an ex-cop, in charge of the data department. When Método 3 couldn’t pay him what it owed him, he appropriated the computers, video and audio recordings, and a bunch of sensitive files. And they’ve shown up at the technical division of the police in Barcelona.
Now “sources” are talking about what’s in this treasure-trove. Apparently Método 3 had been commissioned by a long list of clients to spy on Catalan party leaders, politicians of national parties, judges, prosecutors, executives, and other prominent figures, sources told La Vanguardia. One of the recordings was of a lunch meeting at a restaurant in Barcelona in July 2010 between Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, President of the PP in Catalonia, and a woman named María Victoria Álvarez.
Álvarez was desperate and scared. She told Sánchez-Camacho that she’d gone on a road trip to Andorra with her then boyfriend, Pujol Ferrusola. The trunk was loaded with packets of 500-euro notes, which he deposited in a bank account there.
She outlined how Pujol Ferrusola—son of powerbroker Jordi Pujol, leader of the Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC) from 1974 to 2003 and President of Catalonia from 1980 to 2003—was doing his family’s money laundering. She wanted to report him but feared for her life. So she asked Sánchez-Camacho for help.
The Pujol-Ferrusola family has been fingered in a police report that seeped to the surface in 2012. While Jordi Pujol was in power, companies associated with his sons were awarded lucrative contracts allegedly through false bidding. These cases had been investigated at the time, but nothing happened.... Until the recording of a conversation about a trunk full of euros popped up.
On Thursday, Álvarez finally testified before the High Court about what she’d witnessed.
Also on Thursday, Sánchez-Camacho pressed charges with the police and filed a complaint in court against Método 3. She’d found out by reading the papers that her lunch conversation had been recorded—and that the top official of the Catalan Socialist Party (PSC), José Zaragoza, at the time party secretary, had allegedly commissioned Método 3 to do the dirty work.
Interior Minister Jorge Fernández announced an “exhaustive” investigation. “We have a lot of information,” he said ominously. Zaragoza and others accused of anything whatsoever have denied everything.
Sources have told La Vanguardia that the materials are so massive that the police have formed a special team, supported by police units from Madrid, to investigate them. The lunch episode uncovered a web of “unpredictable scope.” The investigation is still in an early stage, sources said, but the client list of Método 3 is long and “delicate,” and includes officials of various political parties and institutions, and the number of people tangled up in it is vast. “This is about top politicians,” said the sources.
These revelations are driving the political elite ever deeper into a malodorous morass just when that same elite is forcefully tightening the belts of the people. Workers have taken pay cuts, social benefits have been trimmed, families have lost their homes, the VAT, which hits everyone, has been jacked up, all to squeeze the maximum from those who still have any juice left. Yet, Spain’s legal system wasn’t designed to root out corruption; and Rajoy, among others, may be thinking that this too shall pass.
http://politica.elpais.com/politica/2013/02/15/actualidad/1360964803_657045.html
The PP tried to hide the salary settlement disguising BarcenasThe party paid the income tax and Social Security in 2011 and 2012 extesoreroThe extesorero followed tie the game with a normal working relationshipSome popular demand clear explanations of the 'case Barcenas'
FRANCESCO MANETTO Madrid 15 FEB 2013 - 22:56 CET
The salary of 200,000 euros a year that the PP in 2011 and paid in 2012 to Luis Barcenas, who was responsible for the accounts of training as manager and treasurer nearly two decades, actually corresponded to a normal working relationship and not to compost installment of a settlement agreement. The latter had been hitherto wielded explaining the direction of PP to justify why he was still paying money to a leader who had been ousted from office in June 2009 and was suspended from militancy since 2010.
The favored treatment of PP to extesorero, indicted for corruption in 2009 for his involvement in the Gürtel case and with a fortune unreported located in Switzerland, has forced the national party leadership to give contradictory explanations about the reasons that led to further paying a very high salary for the last two years.
The popular is shielded behind a statement that sought to disguise a salary of termination stating that "both parties agreed that the indemnity shall be paid on a monthly fee deferred until December 2012, with the payment by the company of social contributions for the subscription period of that settlement. " That is, the PP admitted that extesorero fees paid to Social Security in a practice that experts labor law specialists and even the Ministry of Employment law fraud qualify.
PP Various sources consulted by this newspaper said yesterday that the party had not committed any illegality in the salaries Barcenas . With this message intended to deny that the payment of Social Security, allowed only for those who actually maintain a working relationship with the company, had been a legal fraud. "It was not a fraud law because it was not a settlement but a normal working relationship that ended in December 2012." This is the unofficial message that aims to describe the relationship, which supposed to pay Social Security and apply Barcenas income tax withholding as any other permanent employee party.
And although no dome spokesman refused to answer the question of whether they had applied Barcenas withholding taxes during those two years that supposedly had taken his settlement in installments, since the party is over admitting this fact, as the chain moved SER. since a month ago extesorero had known that up to 22 million Swiss Gürtel case has rammed an uncontrolled manner to the party leadership and continues to haunt the Prime Minister. And whileMariano Rajoy, Barcenas eternal defender, asked his own falling outside "games and tangles" in what amounts to an admission that the situation wears the PP from within, the official mantra remains the main leaders " transparency exercise "launched by Maria Dolores de Cospedal with double audit summary publication of party accounts pending the Court of Auditors report and the dissemination of tax returns for the last ten years the president.
However, the explanations of the party have been insufficient, and so also annealed popular members of the ranks. The management did not want to teach the official accounting data that match a dozen manuscripts Barcenas notes published by El Pais. And, despite doubts about the conditions of compensation extesorero, the PP has not made public any document to certify it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/feb/14/man-sets-himself-alight-rome-airport
Man sets himself alight at Rome airport
Ivorian man in hospital after showing officials a deportation order, pouring fuel over himself and igniting it
A charred wall and jerrycan at the scene of the fire at Rome's Fiumicino airport. Photograph: Telenews/EPA
A man from Ivory Coast doused himself with fuel and set himself on fire at Rome's Fiumicino airport after showing officials a deportation order.
The incident occurred in a customs police office in Terminal 3 of the airport. Police said the man poured a canister of fuel over himself and ignited it with a lighter.
The man was taken to hospital in a serious condition. A policeman who put out the flames sustained a burn to his arm.
The smoke caused alarm among travellers, and a small part of the airport was briefly closed off. No other injuries or disruption were reported.
|
Email
No comments:
Post a Comment