Two " The Slog " posts for your consideration...... EU item and Greece's cult of corruption

http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/think-not-what-you-can-do-for-the-european-union/

THINK NOT WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR THE EUROPEAN UNION….

…..BUT RATHER THINK ABOUT WHAT IT’S DOING TO YOU

Tonight, the Eurozone finance ministers are due to approve the bailout package for Greece. The MSM widely expects them to do so. As the earlier Slogpost today argued clearly, if they do, it will be because they can only keep their third-rate currency zone and anti-democratic Union going by dealing with crooked people as addicted to the gravy train as they are. Those supposedly representing their citizens in the Athens Government have, in turn, acquiesced in every increasingly bonkers Troika demand for austerity and repayment, because not to do so would take away their seedy access to the People’s money. My God, I’m sounding like a 1970s agitprot Trot. That’s how unpleasant this crew are.

I think a minority of the people in Brussels and Frankfurt know exactly what they’ve unleashed by letting Athens apply CACs to last week’s debt swap. One or two in Greece do, but they couldn’t care a fig anyway. Most of the Troughing Circus in Europe’s capitals have no idea what’s coming from out of Pandora’s derivatives box at all. This is because they are either ignorant or stupid, and in some cases both. But even in the near term, if any in their ranks are smiling at the thought of having nipped the regional crisis in the bud, they should take a look at what’s been happening down here on Earth since they let Venizelos and his mob go ahead to coerce investors.

With variations taken into account, you can buy four Greek euro bonds at the moment for the price of one. That there is a market at all has nothing to do with Greek recovery hopes, and everything to do with an innate madness in modern finance: for as a form of barter, everything now has to have a value. In banks and fund management rooms throughout the Globe, high-IQ idiots are already looking at new ways to variegate, slice and repackage junk and proffer it as a thing of value…..when in reality its value is nil. The exact analogy would be going through Checkpoint Charlie in the 1960s, and being told by the DDR’s officials to exchange one Ostmark for one Bundesmark. You take the Ostmarks back as souvenirs, because for any real transaction, they are valueless. You sell them to somebody, and gradually they acquire a ‘notional’ value as an antique. Greek bondholders were forced to take this worthless toilet tissue. Now it too will re-enter the system, and skew still more concepts of valuation. And some of it will be bought with cheap money sprayed around by the ECB. You couldn’t invent a system as mad as this – it has just somehow evolved: the only thing left for those in charge to try and do is rationalise it.

The Greek debt mountain has been moved from the open market’s holders – rich professionals and major funds – to the institutional sector. Indirectly, that means you and me. Because without our tax monies, there wouldn’t be any central banks or commissions or QEs to mop it up. So the liability has gone from the rich folks to the thrifty folks and the struggling young folks. After the experience of being shafted by Mario Draghi (and the certainty of Greek economic collapse under the weight of The Troika Inquisition) no professional investor will go within two continents of Hellenic sovereign bonds for at least a decade. Moody’s has already called a clear default, and we must expect Fitch and S&P now to do the same. That will unleash yet more liabilities and derivatives. But let’s move on to the next disaster.

Because you can’t seal out a contagion that’s already well under way elsewhere, Portugal has yet to emerge from Casualty. Portuguese 10 year bond yields  at 13-14% may indeed be down from a record  18.29% at the start of the year, but that’s still higher than the 2011 year average of just over 10% -  and Draghi dived in at the end of February to buy short-dated Portuguese securities. The ECB denies this, but it’s perfectly true.

The long term trend in Portuguese bond yields is, for any analyst beyond a meat-head, UP. Effectively, barely a single debt bond there of over 12 months duration has been sold in the open market of late. Portugal’s problem is the same as that still facing the Greeks: rising debt-servicing costs, and falling economic/tax returns with which to control it.

“No way is Greece a one-off,” a regular Slog source based in Madrid tells me, “Not one credit or currency trader of my acquaintance believes that sh*t.”

“Our baseline expectation remains that Portugal will be able to access markets late next year,” Abebe Aemro Selassie of the IMF told Bloomberg at the weekend. You just want to take these robots and give them a shake, don’t you? The Lisbon Government is flat broke, the banks need recapitalising, and previous debt issued to finance infrastructure and communication projects in the country make the real Government sector more exposed to debt than any other West-EU member State. But on and on goes the Stepford denial: Vitor Constancio, ECB vice president and former Bank of Portugal governor, said last week that Portuguese austerity measures were on track and Greece’s debt swap would not be repeated. Within 24 hours, Wolfgang Schauble was at the same crap: “Greece was a completely unique case,” he lied while using a tautology.

Later – when all the dust has finally settled from this fisco-economic Krakatoa – people like Lagarde and Schauble and Draghi will shrug and say “Our mission was to create confidence and save Europe”. Bollocks. Their mission is to protect and secure the survival of a system whereby 27 crooked elites get rich – just so long as they do as they’re told by the big boy elites in Brussels, Berlin and Paris. The crooked elites can only keep their potty schemes going by borrowing from bankers, and once the bankers’ even more insane schemes go wrong, they will work together to save each other. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s anthropology: the Alpha tribe will keep what they see as the Barabarian tribes from the gate by any and all means available, be those legal or illegal.

Five years from now – at the most – there will not be an EU as we know it today. The forces that will destroy both it and the shibboleths of globalist monopolism have, at last, escaped. Geithner must know this. Will the plans he and others tried to bring to fruition now be abandoned? It isn’t going to be easy if, after tonight, 130 bn euros of citizen taxes are handed over to try and resuscitate a corpse, purely because it is an obedient corpse.

and the continuing story of Greece and its endemic cult of corruption.....

http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/revealed-how-paying-double-for-german-subs-helped-to-sink-greece/

REVEALED: HOW PAYING DOUBLE FOR GERMAN SUBS HELPED TO SINK GREECE

The German type 214 submarine….expensive if you’re Greek

“We paid double for three submarines from Germany,” says an Athenian source who has lodged several incriminating documents with The Slog. Most of this, once again, seems to involve the near-ubiquitous role in German engineering and arms supplies of the multiply corrupt company Ferrostaal. Looking at the numbers, some of this appears to have been German profiteering connected to payoffs: “we give you 3 million euros, you lets us stuff the invoice with another 20 million” and so forth. And always in this farrago of filled pockets lurks the presence of numerous company acronyms MFI, MIE (Marine International), PDM, Zelan etc….all odd joint ventures and often registered in Liberia or Cyprus. All of them have obvious attachments to Greek elite members, and most of them in turn have connections to civil service procurement officers and/or senior politicians.

Several names crop up with menacing regularity….especially those of Yannis Beltsios, Michel Filipidis, Michael Matantos, Tony Georgiades, and his now retired father in law on the Board of Bank of Greece (a major participator in the recent default bond swap conducted by Athens) George Lanaras.

Using the quaint terms ‘related offset transactions and obligations’, MIE’s books for instance (supported by an independent legal investigation pointed out to The Slog) show that Michael Matantos of MIE alone handed on a grand total of 55.1 million euros during the period 2000-2004. Most of this was to oil the wheels (aka grease the palms) in relation to the supply of four submarines from Kiel dockyard.

The individual payments noted in that exhaustive report are horrifying, but relatively small-fry:

Between 2002-04, Ferrostaal paid 7.5m euros to PDM and Zelan. No activity of any substance can be traced to this Cypriot-based duo, and all the record of directors have vapourised. But their job was to ‘facilitate contract awards’ by Greek ministries. ‘The complete lack of any documentation supporting performance by these companies raises serious concerns’, says a confidential German report. In 2004, Dusseldorf prosecutors fingered Sotiris Emmanouil, the head of Hellenic Shipyards, as the recipient of illegal bribes running into millions of euros by yet another intermediary – HDW – and a later report showed he had indeed received 2.2 million euros via an affiliate in October of that year. Again, no evidence of services supplied exists. In July 2007, 11 million euros were handed to shady ‘facilitators’ Dolmarton. No back-up of tasks performed.

But when it comes to the Greek government’s purchase of four 214 Class submarines from Germany after 2000, you have to see the amounts syphoned off to believe them. Says the legal investigation referred to earlier:

‘The Project Archimedes [submarine supply] contract was signed in 2000. It was in the volume of 1.14bn euros…..the [German supplier] consortium incurredadditional offset obligations of 1.53 billion euros.’

So the price to the Greek taxpayer doubled….entirely due to corrupt payments made to the Greek governing elite.

A fourth submarine supply contract was signed May 2002. The audit investigation quoted above states that it ‘had a volume of approximately 464.9m euros….and offset obligations of 563 million…’

Again, backhanders doubled the price. And, say several Greek sources, even the ‘real’ price had been stuffed with additional items that represented profiteering by Ferrostaal and its associates.

This is hardly surprising when you consider Ferrostaal’s onerous expenses: between 2000 and 2003, the German supplier paid MIE a staggering 84 million euros, of which over 50 million went on bribing the necessary signees in the never-ending line of outstretched hands called the Greek Elite.

But it is the now even more heavily burdened taxpayers of Greece who are paying the price for this crude rip-off. Most of the perpetrators are doing very nicely thank you. For example, Ferrostaal worked with Yannis Beltsios and paid him €1 million because Greek Defence Minister Akis Tsohatzopolous instructed them to. In April 2011, Parliament voted to prosecute Tsohatzopoulos for corruption….but in August, Greece’s Supreme Court ruled against pursuing the bribery charge because the charge of accepting bribes has been barred by the 2005 immunity law.

That law was authored and pushed through by….Evangelo Venizelos. And naturally, Akis and Evangelo have been colleagues together in PASOK for nearly two decades.

Ever more outward go the tentacles of Greek elite squids, these gigantic deep-bribed calamares. George Lanaras’s ex-wife, following years of corrupt sales to South Africa, married F W de Klerk. Lanaras’s son in law Tony Georgiades is a billionaire shipping magnate, and alleged key sanctions-buster under apartheid. He reportedly had the ear of South African President Thabo Mbeki while acting as a lobbyist for  Ferrostaal, which led the German submarine global marketing consortium. No matter who’s in power – black or white – these eminences grisesare always there in the shadows.

Michel Filipidis is a lawyer who moved to France, where he owns and runs Syspertec, a software information specialist ‘serving large companies, banks, and financial institutions’ as the website puts it. Syspertec is being modest. It’s clients include the French Central Bank, the French Tresor Publique, BNP Paribas, Credit Agricole….and many other institutions hugely exposed to Greek debt and fearful of a Hellenic default. Well well well.

And Michael Matantos is a director of three  companies, Unimog Investments, Kassos Steam Navigation, and Sunbeam Maritime. It is remarkable how many of the intermediaries in this tale have names including ‘maritime’ or similar. Like Marine and Industrial Enterprises (MIE) of which we learned so much in yesterday’s Slogpost. Matantos’s partner in Sunbeam is Constantine Kyrkilis…who used to be an Executive Vice-President at MIE.

Nothing changes, and nothing ever will as long as these leeches are on Greece’s back. And they are, in essence and influence, the reason why the Greek elite didn’t tell the Troika to go jump in the lake months ago. For these people are part of a vast network of sales, graft, survival and prosperity which would largely cease to exist were Greece to be ejected from the EU.

The Greek nation is facing default for all kinds of reasons that range from insane lending policies by French and German banks to clever schemes worked out by Goldman Sachs to help the Greek Establishment lie to Brussels. But is is also in the mire because of many such cases of official greed and German profiteers. Perhaps, the next time German tabloids start shrieking about ‘lazy Greeks’, they should bear this in mind.