High life | 11 June 2011

Here’s the definitive scoop on poor old Hellas, better known nowadays as the EU country that missed its day at the municipal dump. Greece will default sometime in 2012 and, if there are any doubters around, tell them this comes from the great economist Taki, the very same Taki who smelled a rat even before the Greek government was caught red-handed cooking the books by entering into a massive controversial (yet legal) deal with the poisonous giant squid Goldman Sachs. The latter took its giant fee and went back home in order to continue to screw the innocent. The Greeks stayed on the beach and are now paying for past follies.

The trouble is that no one responsible for the disaster has been punished and allegations of corruption continue to surface. Recently, an ex-minister of defence under the socialist government of ten years ago, one Tsohatsopoulos, was named in a corruption probe being carried out by German prosecutors. This concerned the sale of four submarines to Greece. Kickbacks totalling hundreds of millions of euros to win contracts with foreign governments are alleged to have been paid by the company concerned. Tsohatsopoulos denies the allegations.

Now I ask you, dear readers, how can anyone take these Greek politicians seriously? Constantine Karamanlis, dead for years, called the military junta crooks, but Taki knew better when he sent food packages to the wives of the coup leaders while they rotted in jail. Karamanlis oversaw the first period of corruption when he managed to talk Greece into the EU back in the late Seventies. Andreas Papandreou, father of the present Greek premier, known as Ali Baba because he and his 40 ministers stole the country blind, turned lying and stealing into a Greek art form, a far more profitable endeavour than building useless edifices like the Parthenon ever was.