On the day
he took office as Greece's shipping minister in June 2012, Kostis Moussouroulis
received a visit from a 90-year-old ship-owner.
That's the way Greek ship-owners like it.
The magnates who run one of the biggest merchant marine fleets in the world
have long argued that if Greece tried to tax them, they would leave - and that
their departure would devastate the economy. In recent years, as international
institutions repeatedly bailed out Greece, the lenders have also pushed Athens
to beef up its tax take.
Ship-owners have resisted any effort to
ditch the tax breaks they enjoy, and no government has dared touch them.
"Shipping is a pillar of the Greek economy," says the Union of Greek
Ship-owners, the ocean-going industry's main association.
Greece's statistics office says shipping
contributes around $9bn - or 4pc - of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). When you
include related business, the industry says, the figure jumps to 7.5pc of GDP,
or about $17bn a year. Deep-sea shipping and related trades employ more than
192,000 people, it says. That's 4pc of all Greek workers.
But an analysis of corporate filings and
economic data by Reuters suggests shipping's heroic role in Greece's economy is
largely a myth. That's because Greek ship-owners include in their statistics
billions of dollars which never enter the economy.
If Greece counted only payments to Greek
companies and individuals - as other countries do - the deep-sea shipping
industry's contribution would be equivalent to around 1pc of GDP. For Greece,
the cost of the tax breaks granted to shipowners runs into hundreds of millions
of euro. Though that is small compared with the country's debt, plenty of other
citizens have had to tighten their belts.
The ship-owners "are powerful in that
they… get the media to write what they want," said economist and former
finance minister George Papaconstantinou. "Immediately when you start touching
them you start to hear: 'We are 7pc of the economy we bring 17bn every year,
200,000 jobs'… That's not the case."
The Union of Greek Shipowners declined to
comment on the Reuters analysis, but said any suggestion it used political or
media influence to perpetuate inaccuracies about its economic contribution was
"a completely false allegation".
The industry says government tax revenues
from Greek shipping have increased more than eight-fold since the outbreak of
the economic crisis. But today, instead of Greek-based ships manned by Greek
sailors, shipping is mainly made up of small management offices in Athens' port
of Piraeus that collect freight fees on behalf of their tax-haven registered
parents.
It's not clear how many jobs the industry generates.
Shipowners, too, often live abroad. Papaconstantinou, the former finance
minister who said he doubted the importance of shipping, is one politician who
wants change. He said the government should commission an independent report to
estimate the real contribution of the sector. But he said the industry would
resist. "It's not by accident that you do not have an authoritative
independent study of this," he said. (Reuters)
Πηγή: Irish Independent
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