Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

It has been announced that the banks in Greece will be closed tomorrow.

If Greece leaves the Euro and probably the EU, it will strengthen Cameron's hand for treaty change. The last thing that Merkel and others will want is the UK leaving the EU as well as Greece.

early retirement in greece

it gets even worse .......
Yiannis Vroutsis presented data to the parliament, explaining that almost 75% of Greek pensioners are trying to secure their early retirement through legal provisions that allow them to stop working before the age of 61


uk can't support retirement at 65 and we have a much more healthy economy

Some civil servants in Greece can retire at 50. It is the same in Italy.

If you play a wind instruments such as a trombone you can retire at 50 because it is a hazardous job! The same applies to pastry cooks, hairdressers and a raft of other so called dangerous jobs.

This is from 2012

Even on a stiflingly hot summer's day, the Athens underground is a pleasure. It is air-conditioned, with plasma screens to entertain passengers relaxing in cool, cavernous departure halls - and the trains even run on time.

There is another bonus for users of this state-of-the-art rapid transport system: it is, in effect, free for the five million people of the Greek capital.

With no barriers to prevent free entry or exit to this impressive tube network, the good citizens of Athens are instead asked to 'validate' their tickets at honesty machines before boarding. Few bother.

This is not surprising: fiddling on a Herculean scale — from the owner of the smallest shop to the most powerful figures in business and politics — has become as much a part of Greek life as ouzo and olives.

Indeed, as well as not paying for their metro tickets, the people of Greece barely paid a penny of the underground’s £1.5 billion cost — a ‘sweetener’ from Brussels (and, therefore, the UK taxpayer) to help the country put on an impressive 2004 Olympics free of the city’s notorious traffic jams.

The transport perks are not confined to the customers. Incredibly, the average salary on Greece’s railways is £60,000, which includes cleaners and track workers - treble the earnings of the average private sector employee here.

The overground rail network is as big a racket as the EU-funded underground. While its annual income is only £80 million from ticket sales, the wage bill is more than £500m a year — prompting one Greek politician to famously remark that it would be cheaper to put all the commuters into private taxis.

‘We have a railroad company which is bankrupt beyond comprehension,’ says Stefans Manos, a former Greek finance minister. ‘And yet, there isn’t a single private company in Greece with that kind of average pay.’

Significantly, since entering Europe as part of an ill-fated dream by politicians of creating a European super-state, the wage bill of the Greek public sector has doubled in a decade. At the same time, perks and fiddles reminiscent of Britain in the union-controlled 1970s have flourished.

Take a short trip on the metro to the city’s cooler northern suburbs, and you will find an enclave of staggering opulence.

Here, in the suburb of Kifissia, amid clean, tree-lined streets full of designer boutiques and car showrooms selling luxury marques such as Porsche and Ferrari, live some of the richest men and women in the world.

With its streets paved with marble, and dotted with charming parks and cafes, this suburb is home to shipping tycoons such as Spiros Latsis, a billionaire and friend of Prince Charles, as well as countless other wealthy industrialists and politicians.

One of the reasons they are so rich is that rather than paying millions in tax to the Greek state, as they rightfully should, many of these residents are living entirely tax-free.

Along street after street of opulent mansions and villas, surrounded by high walls and with their own pools, most of the millionaires living here are, officially, virtually paupers.

How so? Simple: they are allowed to state their own earnings for tax purposes, figures which are rarely challenged. And rich Greeks take full advantage.

Astonishingly, only 5,000 people in a country of 12 million admit to earning more than £90,000 a year — a salary that would not be enough to buy a garden shed in Kifissia.

Yet studies have shown that more than 60,000 Greek homes each have investments worth more than £1m, let alone unknown quantities in overseas banks, prompting one economist to describe Greece as a ‘poor country full of rich people’.

Manipulating a corrupt tax system, many of the residents simply say that they earn below the basic tax threshold of around £10,000 a year, even though they own boats, second homes on Greek islands and properties overseas.

And, should the taxman rumble this common ruse, it can be dealt with using a ‘fakelaki’ — an envelope stuffed with cash. There is even a semi-official rate for bribes: passing a false tax return requires a payment of up to 10,000 euros (the average Greek family is reckoned to pay out £2,000 a year in fakelaki.)

Even more incredibly, Greek shipping magnates — the king of kings among the wealthy of Kifissia — are automatically exempt from tax, supposedly on account of the great benefits they bring the country.

Yet the shipyards are empty; once employing 15,000, they now have less than 500 to service the once-mighty Greek shipping lines which, like the rest of the country, are in terminal decline.

With Greek President George Papandreou calling for a crackdown on these tax dodgers — who are believed to cost the economy as much as £40bn a year — he is now resorting to bizarre means to identify the cheats. After issuing warnings last year, government officials say he is set to deploy helicopter snoopers, along with scrutiny of Google Earth satellite pictures, to show who has a swimming pool in the northern suburbs — an indicator, officials say, of the owner’s wealth.

Officially, just over 300 Kifissia residents admitted to having a pool. The true figure is believed to be 20,000. There is even a boom in sales of tarpaulins to cover pools and make them invisible to the aerial tax inspectors.

But faced with the threat of a crackdown, money is now pouring out of the country into overseas tax havens such as Liechtenstein, the Bahamas and Cyprus.

‘Other popular alternatives include setting up offshore companies in Cyprus or the British Virgin Islands, or the purchase of real estate abroad,’ says one doctor, who declares an income of less than £90,000 yet earns five times that amount.

There has also been a boom in London property purchases by Athens-based Greeks in an attempt to hide their true worth from their domestic tax authorities.

‘These anti-tax evasion measures by the government force us to resort to even more detailed tax evasion ploys,’ admits Petros Iliopoulos, a civil engineer.

Hotlines have been set up offering rewards for people who inform on tax dodgers. Last month, to show the government is serious, it named and shamed 68 high-earning doctors found guilty of tax evasion.

Perhaps if the Greeks themselves had shown more willingness to tighten their belts and pay taxes due to the state, voters across Europe might not now be feeling such anger towards them.

But having strolled the streets of Kifissia, and watched the Greek hordes stream past the honesty boxes on the underground, it does not take a degree in European economics to know when somebody is taking advantage — at our expense.

as the old story goes in greece ......
of course i don't pay tax; i pay the taxman

Meanwhile at Chequers.

meanwhile
rather than posting your customary unamusing cartoons, i and perhaps we would be more interested to hear what you (fred) think should happen both to and in greece

Can you see Cameron being turfed overboard at the back of the boat as garbage!

Or, is it Manuel!

meanwhile
rather than posting your customary unamusing cartoons, i and perhaps we would be more interested to hear what you (fred) think should happen both to and in greece

The Euro may take a hit tomorrow against most currencies. The pound may do well vs Euro.

great discussions - eur already plunged 1.5% at start of trading in asia - think we all know what is going on in greece - additionally so many factors to consider, contagion, nutters behind the wheels @greece @ecb @imf @eurozone, russia, grexit, brexit (uk lol) other countries, immigration, china et cetera - and now the US sticking their oar in (obviously the US never have selfish reasons to do this lol) - fantastic day ahead tomorrow

apparently fred has no view at all of the future and can only dream of what he fondly thinks of as the golden years of the 50s
he's now so old and dribbly that he can no longer think for himself but needs his agency nurse to do it for him

lol cynic

ft front page tomorrow............readable by enlarging the page wiv a click

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CInQrcnWEAAHmUF.jpg:large

Fiber off 1.6 cents at the Asian open. Hardly another SNB Black Swan.

Manuel,

When I consider you I think of the following:

"
Do you know the sad thing is that even if some reached Utopia they would be greedy enough to want more for themselves and they have the arrogance to think they justified it?"

==-=-=-===-

Also, arrogance does not make up for ignorance, but probably your case you are too ignorant to realise this.

But I was told not to

Manuel,

When I consider you I think of the following:

"
Do you know the sad thing is that even if some reached Utopia they would be greedy enough to want more for themselves and they have the arrogance to think they justified it?"

==-=-=-===-

Also, arrogance does not make up for ignorance, but probably in your case you are too ignorant to realise this.

But I was told not to go gently into the night and I don't intend to.