ROBBING GREECE BLIND
On Zakynthos, culture of scamming government hides in plain sight
The Venetians who ruled this island paradise for centuries called it the Flower of the East. Much more recently some Greeks have called it “to nisi ton tiflon,” or “the Island of the Blind.”
This island in the Ionian Sea is famous for its sublime beaches and sparkling turquoise waters. It is also where one of the most brazen scams to plunder Greece’s beleaguered treasury took place.
In a notorious scheme that may provide guidance to eurocrats trying to figure out whether this country deserves another big bailout Sunday, as many as 700 people of the 35,000 residents falsely claimed they were blind. They were rewarded with more than 350 euros ($477) a month in compensation.
A leading local politician and an ophthalmologist were said to be the ringleaders, although in a lovely twist the medical documents some of the “blind” provided to the authorities to get their money had been signed by a urologist.
The scheme, which operated for years, was finally shut down in 2011 after one of the “blind” was reportedly caught driving his Porsche. Among the cheats receiving the monthly stipend, which cost the government several million euros a year, were a taxi driver and a hairdresser.
The epicentres of this trickery were from the hamlets of Kalipado and Kipseli.
The communities are a few minutes drive north of the town of Zakynthos, where Russian oligarchs and Hollywood royalty tie up their mega-yachts across a promenade that is as pretty as any on the Mediterranean Sea.
When I stopped by Kalipado, a few residents were enjoying the evening air and the buzz of cicadas on the balconies of their pastel-coloured homes, which were secluded in a lush maze of leafy palm trees and bougainvillea. None was willing to speak with me. However, a few of their neighbours in Zakynthos were.
“This is a beautiful place and people come from all over to admire it, but every village has its donkeys. I don’t feel guilty,” said Spartakos Delianis, who was a mathematics professor before becoming a restaurateur.
“I know from a good friend of mine who grew up in Canada before returning to Greece that your country was built on the rules of Her Majesty. Every country has its own mentality and it has never been the same as that here. What we have is the mentality that rules are made to be broken.”
To make his point, Delianis pointed at the motor bikes that constantly roared past his seaside restaurant. Although not wearing a helmet carries a mandatory 350-euro fine, the law is rarely enforced.
Nobody on Zakynthos wore a helmet because being Greek permits “the freedom to break the law,” Delianis said. “When my son sees that nobody wears a helmet, he thinks he, too, doesn’t have to wear one.”
Anastasia Pomoni, who worked at the airport, smiled when asked whether the sobriquet, “Island of the Blind,” was deserved.
“I don’t see anything that I can do about this,” she said. “It was a common secret here, but this is not the only place in Greece where this kind of thing goes on. This is a beautiful island where some people tried to earn money too easily. Just look at the voters lists. Of 100 names on the list, 20 of them are dead and some of them died a long time ago.
“To be honest, with the system we have in Greece, nothing shocks me any more.”
As Delianis bluntly put it, “In Greece the fish stinks from the head.”
The whole debate about Greece and its use of the euro since 2001 would never have arisen if the country had told the truth about its finances from the outset. As it finally admitted to the European Union in 2004, it had cooked its books, underestimating the deficit, specifically so it would be eligible to join the eurozone gravy train.
Guesses vary about how much money is lost through tax evasion and tax avoidance, with estimates ranging as high as 20 billion euros a year. Proving this with any precision is difficult, but the University of Chicago produced a paper that suggested since four Greeks in five reported they owed more than what they earned, but were somehow able to pay off their debts, they were obviously grossly under-reporting their real incomes. In what may or may not come as a surprise, the statistics indicated accountants were the leading offenders.
There are many egregious examples of entitlements gone berserk. One of the betterknown was that until a few years ago about 40,000 unmarried daughters of dead public service workers received 550 million euros a year. The rule now is these women can no longer receive a share of their late fathers’ pensions after they reach the age of 18. But Greece’s Court of Audit is considering whether sons should be entitled to retroactively claim this bounty because they had been victims of sex discrimination.
“I cannot say this is right,” Pomoni said. “There is a sense today that we are bad because we do not pay what we should, but we are not all bad.”
Countering Zakynthos’s reputation as “the Island of the Blind,” she recalled its residents’ heroism in successfully hiding every one of its 275 Jews during the Nazi occupation.
Nobody did any jail time for the fraud scheme in Zakynthos. Those who were caught were ordered to repay their ill-gotten gains in instalments. According to local police, they are still doing so.
Several islanders reacted with fury when told I was doing a story about how many of them had claimed to be blind. Spartakos Delianis seemed bemused by the inquiries.
“It was a beautiful idea to be in Europe, but we started from a different point than the other countries,” he said. “You judge Greeks from a Canadian point of view. But what we have here is an invisible system. You can bang your head against this wall, but you can’t smash it.”