Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Greek government-debt crisis" in English language version.
At least I'm not starving, there are bakeries that give me something, and I can get leftover souvlaki [kebab] at a fast-food shop late at night," [one homeless Greek] said. "But there are many more of us now, so how long will that last?
'Greece actually executed the swap transactions to reduce its debt-to-gross-domestic-product ratio because all member states were required by the Maastricht Treaty to show an improvement in their public finances,' Laffan said in an e- mail. 'The swaps were one of several techniques that many European governments used to meet the terms of the treaty.'
{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: location (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link){{cite book}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of January 2024 (link)At least I'm not starving, there are bakeries that give me something, and I can get leftover souvlaki [kebab] at a fast-food shop late at night," [one homeless Greek] said. "But there are many more of us now, so how long will that last?
In dozens of deals across the Continent, banks provided cash upfront in return for government payments in the future, with those liabilities then left off the books. Greece, for example, traded away the rights to airport fees and lottery proceeds in years to come.
This credit disguised as a swap didn't show up in the Greek debt statistics. Eurostat's reporting rules don't comprehensively record transactions involving financial derivatives. 'The Maastricht rules can be circumvented quite legally through swaps,' says a German derivatives dealer. In previous years, Italy used a similar trick to mask its true debt with the help of a different US bank.
'These instruments were not invented by Greece, nor did investment banks discover them just for Greece,' said Christophoros Sardelis, who was chief of Greece's debt management agency when the contracts were conducted with Goldman Sachs. Such contracts were also used by other European countries until Eurostat, the EU's statistic agency, stopped accepting them later in the decade. Eurostat has also asked Athens to clarify the contracts.
Siemens recently reached an out of court settlement with Greece following claims it had bribed cabinet ministers and other officials to secure contracts before the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. Tassos Mandelis, a former socialist transport minister, admitted he had accepted a €100,000 payment from Siemens in 1998.