"THE LIST"... a story in three parts.

1.   Lagarde, Falciani and HSBC... the short story.

In 2010 the then Minister of Minister of Economic Affairs, Finance and Employment of France passed a list of  Greek HSBC customers to the Greek Government an act that she repeated in 2012.


This passed list has been exchanged and manipulated and it is doubtful if by now it is the same as it was in the hands of Lagarde.



It was of course H. Falciani who, fleeing Switzerland, gave the list of over 100,000 names of HSBC customers to Lagarde.

Falciani has been condemned by many as a thief and the Swiss have asked for his extradition from France, which has turned them down as no French citizen can be extradited.
Note here that approximately 150 journalists from around the world are involved in this expose affair.


In the light of the latest revelations on the activities of HSBC, which itself has admitted as wrongful,  it is hard to   accept that investors on the list were law abiding tax payers.
In any way it is for the state machinery and tax drawing authorities to decipher this.
Should such a list be made public?
Maybe the question should be:

Should I have eyes on a list made public?

If you think that you can gain something from it you can see the list on this link.

HERE.

2.   The List, Papandreou and the long arm of tax evasion.

After recent controversial publications, the ex wife of Andreas Papandreou has denied she is the owner of a 500,000 Euro account.
The allegations of ownership of such account first came to light when the Italian newspaper  Corrierre della Sera published comments by H. Falciani saying that Yiorgos Papandreou was blackmailed by President Sarkozy to take Greece to the IMF or he would make public Margaret's 500Milion account.

In the picture Yiorgos Papandreou third from the left and Margaret Papandreou 6th from the left.

3.   The wider world connection.

Further from this example of the shadowy existence of the Greek Tax Evader endemic in Greek society, it is in many others too and a glimpse may be had in the table below published by" Swiss Leaks" in a report  by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, based in Washington DC and French newspaper Le Monde showing the extend of tax evasion from around the world following the trail of French Investigators who went to England to interview British HSBC Bank  IT worker H. Falciani regarding French client's accounts.
The rest is history.

Greece has stashed 2.6 Billion Euros in Swiss bank accounts.

Over 2,000 Greeks have Swiss bank accounts.

 

 

 

 

The following entry is directly taken from Global Post.

Last month, Oxfam reported that the 80 richest people in the world now control as much money as the 3.5 billion poorest people. By 2016, if current trends continue, the richest 1 percent will own more than half of the world’s total wealth. (Currently, they own 48 percen

That’s why the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported on the 6,500 Israelis who held $10 billion in HSBC accounts between 1988 and 2007. It’s why the Guardian called attention to HSBC accounts linked to high-profile British politicians and donors. And it’s why the CBC named and shamed Canadian billionaires Frank Giustra, Joseph Kruger II, and Marcel Adams.

The “Swiss Leaks” story and the stories it’s revealed are developing, so follow along. The Swiss government has just opened a criminal investigation against the Geneva-based HSBC for “aggravated money laundering.”
Global Post's website is:

Sources:

GlobalPost
DefenceNet
The Guardian
LeMonde
Keep talking Greece

Eurogroup My love

Has a new love story grown at the Eurogroup meeting?

It is the instant fame that Varoufakis has received which has made him so desirable to the opposite sex.
So desirable indeed that even the strong woman of IMF Laggard has fallen under his spell.
Or maybe she has identified with his stylish, slightly leatheresque look and his chiselled features.
One way or another they both will have a hard job explaining just how they were  both seen to wear the same scarf at the Eurogroup.

Really!
How can they POssibly explain  it.

Here is what goes round at the corridors.
There was a mix up with the rooms at the hotel where they both had bookings and when Yiannis saw the forgotten scarf immediately made it his own to remind him of his tete-a-tete with gorgeous Laggard.
Notice the untacked shirt.

Danae beware...

Oil for everybody, but who will win the war?

                                                  

In recent months the price of oil has fallen to a six year low.
What has triggered this down ward trend? When will it end? Who is going to gain from it?
In the graphic we can see the development of the price since the late 80s.
Since the late 90s the demand for oil by China has been growing until its peak in the late noughties.
Price kept going up as demand was much greater than available oil.
Then the financial crisis happened which changed the dynamics of the markets.
North America, affected by high prices, started fraking in the shale fields of North Dakota and Texas  and oil sands of Alberta. This caused stockpiling of plentiful oil mainly because of weak European economies and governmental efficiency policies around the world.
The price of oil was therefore on a downward slope.























To add to this slide, although OPEC countries need high prices for their economy, they have done nothing to make prices rise. Instead and in order to maintain market share they keep extracting.
At the same time shale extraction is becoming uneconomic and fears are voiced by producers who are in trouble of closing down shop.
So all that we have to do is to sit behind the wheel drive as much as we can and wit to see who will win.