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Saturday, June 09, 2007

The Sordid Story of Greek Universities...

...followed avidly on this blog and ignored by everyone else, has reached a kind of filth-climax: The rector, vice-rector, and chief accountant of Panteion University (apparently one of the better Greek universities... but what can this mean? They're all bad.) have together over five or so years stolen over ten million dollars of public funds intended for their university.

Ted Laskaris has details on his blog. First he notes the total shock and indignation of most Greeks at the severity of the jail sentences the men have gotten. After all, everybody steals from the state... why single out this pack of thieves?

After sampling expert opinion in Athens, Laskaris summarizes local attitudes:

If you are a good boy overall, it's okay to steal from and rob the public coffer.

If you are a published academic of some recognition, and choose to take your university's cash in order to decorate your villa and spend happy holidays on Mykonos with your male or female "companions," the courts should give you a symbolic sentence irrespective of the magnitude of the offense.

Punishing those who steal from the Greek taxpayer should be handled at misdemeanor level since it's not really a crime.

Punishing those who steal from the Greek taxpayer with abandon with fitting sentences causes society to descend into barbarism.


Here's some detail from Laskaris on what they did:

[They] siphoned off fat chunks of cash between 1992 and 1999 to pay for furnishing their villas with expensive fixtures, buying a Ferrari, and spending lavishly on other good life activities. The same group of conscientious officers charged the university for millions of virtual student meals and pocketed the cash thus written into the university budget.



Laskaris concludes:

Although the Panteion trial just barely scratched the surface of the enormous corruption that dominates the Greek public sector, sending some of the perpetrators down the river in chains gives us a flitting moment of satisfaction.

I'm not so sure though that the outcome of this indictment may be seen as establishing a "trend." For each Panteion-like trial, there are dozens of other infinitely more serious cases of plundering public money and strolling whistling all the way down the road to off-shore banks without the slightest brush with the law.