Only one in 17 firms violated tax laws

Tax evasion among Greek companies has dropped to a remarkably low 5.8 percent according to 4,124 random checks performed by authorities in the period from January 6 to 19, with 1,845 in the domains of catering and entertainment, according to Finance Ministry data. The 239 companies to have breached tax legislation were found to have committed a total of 2,170 violations.

Balkan graft.

Bulgaria and Romania need to do more to strengthen their legal systems and fight high-level corruption and organized crime, the European Union said in a report on the European Union’s poorest states. Romania “has made progress in

The lack of clarity in the way the capital gains tax on property transactions will be calculated has forced the delay of hundreds of sales as notaries are unable to complete the process. Finance Ministry officials have been meeting in recent days in a bid to solve the various problems and possibly to amend the tax rates. many areas” and “long-awaited” legislative changes have remained on track, though “concerns about judicial independence remain,” European Commission spokesman Mark Gray told reporters in Brussels yesterday. Bulgaria’s judicial reform progress has not “been sufficient and remains fragile,” he said. The two countries that joined the 28nation bloc in 2007 are judged to be among the EU’s most corrupt along with Greece and Italy, according to Berlin-based research organization Transparency International. The Black Sea nations have received repeated warnings to fight corruption and to ensure a fair distribution of EU aid. Romania, the bigger of the two, stood to receive 32 billion euros in EU aid through 2013. Bulgaria got less than 11 billion euros.

Turkey bonds.

Turkey hired banks for its first dollar bond sale since October as it faces higher funding costs amid a clash between the government and the judici- ary. The initial price guidance for the 10year bond is about 6 percent, said a person familiar with the plans, who asked not to be identified because the details are private. That compares with the 3.47 percent at which it sold similar-maturity securities on January 8 last year, and the current 5.39 percent yield on those bonds. Turkey’s 10-year lira debt yields 10.1 percent. Turkey’s treasury risks paying more to borrow than implied by the yields on its international borrowings should the lira extend its 10 percent decline since December 16, a day before an investigation into alleged government corruption became public. “We predict the bond sale size to be around $1 billion considering the debt requirements for 2014,” Aras Guvenc, an associate at Maxis Investments Ltd in London, said by e-mail yesterday. “We think the timing for the bond sale is good, given the low level of yields globally.”