A system full of holes
Nothing can really be regarded as “news” when it comes to corruption. Corruption is so ubiquitous, that nothing comes as a surprise anymore, nothing shocks us. From scrap metal thieves to sundry suspect circles lining their pockets with European Union funding, the list has now grown with the addition of a racket operating inside the Catholic Church of Greece. Two priests who are high up in the hierarchy are being investigated for embezzling church funds and for shady dealings with nightclub owners suspected of laundering dirty money.
From the theft of tons of metal from the national railway network, most recently in Aspropyrgos in West Attica, to EU subsidy claims by livestock farmers and olive growers for nonexistent grazing pastures and trees, corruption is so widespread that even people who are hesitant or whose job it is to uphold the law succumb to the temptation and go on the take: tax officials blackmailing business owners, civil servants exchanging favors for bribes, military officers inking inflated arms procurement deals and so forth and so on – ad nauseam. It’s been going on for decades. And every time a new scandal breaks out, there’s a new twist to add some spice to the monotony of it all. In the most recent scrap metal racket case, for example, it turns out that an employee of the contractor assigned by the railway company to carry out work on the track at Aspropyrgos was in cahoots with a Roma gang of metal thieves, feeding them information and even helping them transport their loot.
And after every new scandal, we hear promises of intensified inspections and stricter penalties, as ministers tout their “zero tolerance” policies – and life goes on as before. What else?
In the interest of being fair, however, we should also remember the people who bring these scandals to the surface, the people who are doing their jobs properly. They now have a helping hand thanks to digital technology that makes tasks like audits and cross-checking information a lot more efficient. Digital governance also makes it a bit harder to commit fraud and more likely that the fraud will be found out, elements that may act as a discouragement, but not as a deterrent.
It’s been 50 years since singer Dionysis Savvopoulos described Greece like an “endless shanty,” pointing to a poorly constructed system so full of holes that corruption is allowed to run rampant. Now, in the age of artificial intelligence, the shanty has been modernized, but it hasn’t been demolished. It’s still very much there.