I did some searching on the culture in Greece
regarding money laundering and hiding money
there. Surprisingly (or not) just in the last couple years has Greece joined in to try and clean up the problems with inter-country
hidden bank accounts even though most of Europe had done so for years. Seems like Greece was condoning this until recently and
even now I wonder how lax their system is.
Maybe FD and his relatives are aware of this
and know the easy loopholes to hiding money there.
I've been waiting for this topic to come up. There are lots of POV and mine is a gross oversimplification of the very complicated financial part of the equation in Greece in order to just think about whether it would have made sense for FO to send cash back to Greece in dollars or euros or gold.
Not sure how many followed along for all the coverage on the Greek financial crisis but it documented what many have known and suspected for years about how things function in Greece. I'm not bringing this up to get political but to try to explain in a simple way that the crisis made certain things easier and certain things harder in Greece. I also think that most Greeks with money held their money outside of country, long before the crisis ever hit.
Probably more folks might be familiar with the organized 'inefficiency' and 'graft/bribery' present in Italian govt and the way things work there in general. Well, take the Italian situation and IMO double the severity and that might on a good day describe doing business in Greece. The situation is a shame IMO because it has made so many things next to impossible to change in Greece to alter the course of events post crisis. Greece was brought to its knees by the crisis and people did what they had to do to survive IMO. Greeks are survivors IMO and they are also creative by nature!
Its a very sad situation overall with the Greek and Italian economies and while both govts are working to unravel the situation in their countries. in general you are talking institutionalized ways of doing business that have been going on for more years than the US has been a country.
My guess is that if FO wanted to move dollars or Euros to Greece it would have not taken much to do and there would have been many ready places to park the funds. I'm not sure this is what was done but it might have been done to help friends/family that were crushed by the crisis.
All this being said though I wonder if the cash would have been sent to Greece unless it was with a very trusted source known to the family as the crisis impacted virtually everyone and the financial sector in particular. I wonder though also whether Turkey might have been a better bet or even Cyprus?
Here is a quick read on the corruption situation in Greece attached in pdf file below:
"Still, they’re not optimistic these measures would change what they call
“the entire value system of nihilism and antisocial behavior that parents and schools have allowed to percolate through Greek society.”
Research has shown that Greece’s culture of mistrust and cheating is far more extreme than anywhere in Europe. According to surveys, 80 percent of Greeks believe it’s all right to claim government benefits to which they are not entitled, while 20 percent disapprove. In most of Europe, the ratio is almost exactly flipped". [BBM]
But all this political noise in Greece could have simply been avoided by FO using Bitcoin too. IDK. Depends if FO wanted to just park the cash or whether the cash was deployed to take advantage of the Greek crash to buy property or he needed to help friends/family? I have no knowledge of Greek property markets to even know if this would make sense in terms of an investment.
MOO MOO MOO
