Ministers back record on public sector and tax evasion
Greece can pull back from the ?brink of catastrophe,? Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos said on Friday as he defended the government against opposition attacks claiming PASOK had not taken enough action to tackle tax evasion or to scale back the public sector during its time in power.
?The ship has not sunk and will not sink,? Venizelos insisted in Parliament. But he admitted Greece had given up much of its control over economic policy. ?Our fiscal and economic sovereignty has been limited.?
The government came in for strong criticism from the Popular Orthodox Rally (LAOS) and the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), in particular for repeatedly increasing taxes but not doing enough to track down evaders.
The finance minister responded by saying that the government aims to publish a list next week of major tax dodgers and would step up efforts to obtain from Swiss authorities details of Greeks who have deposited money there. He revealed that data from Greek banks showed that in 2009, 8,667 customers transferred almost 5 billion euros out of the country. Of these, 3,718 declared an annual income of less than 20,000 euros.
Administrative Reform Minister Dimitris Reppas defended the government?s record on public sector reform by saying that since 2009, the number of people employed in the civil service or at local authorities has decreased by about 200,000. Roughly 85,000 were on fixed-term contracts.
Reppas also responded to barbs from New Democracy, which claimed PASOK had created 41 new departments and public bodies rather than reducing their number, by saying that 36 of the ?new? organizations were created by the merger or renaming of old ones and that the remaining five received no public funding.
