MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Since 2003 an estimated 261bn dollars have fled from Greece, says NGO

Raymond Baker, head of Global Financial Integrity: some of the money has been laundered back

Greek nationals have deposited overseas an estimate 261 billion dollars from illegal activities, from tax evasion and elusion to criminal actions or simple from rampant corruption, according to economist and head of the Non Government Organization, Global Financial Integrity, Raymond Baker.

“A huge loss for an economy that small” points out Baker in an interview with Der Spiegel, adding that most of the money outflow left Greece from has taken refuge in “fiscal paradises worldwide”.

However, Baker whose NGO investigates international flows of non declared black money estimates that up to 200 billion dollars have returned to Greece, between 2010 and 2012, because of the recession and the banking system freeze on credits.

“In a recession it’s more difficult for private citizens and companies to have access to credit. That attracts illegal money which simply fills up the vaccum”, said Baker.

Furthermore “a crisis is ideal to launder money. You buy cheap real estate and wait for it to climb back: criminal investor work on a longer term than traditional business”.

However the stats indicate that the Greek government does “not control the illegal financial flows. Greece even before the current crisis had the second most submerged (parallel, black) economy of the 25 countries investigated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development: only Mexico was worse”. 

Baker added that the problem is a characteristic of Euro zone countries in crisis: “it does not surprise that Italy, Portugal and Spain have respectively the second, third and fourth largest parallel economies in the Euro Zone.