I smell George Soros.
Robbery. I don’t think Greece can recover from this.
Invest $6 billion, and you will generally want an equity position. Now that the government has a minority position, maybe the banks will quit giving away their money.
One of two things happened. Either members of the Greek Parliament passed these measures to enrich themselves by buying shares of the banks at a greatly reduced rate, or they passed legislation that they didn’t understand in its complexity.
I suspect for most members of parliament, it was the latter. This is a problem in almost every nation where bureaucrats and specialized lawyers write the laws and the actual politicians who pass them are given a simplified summary of what the law is intended to do.
If I had my way, there would be a Constitutional amendment that required a sitting member of the House or Senate to read into the record each bill in its entirety before the bill could be called to a vote.
We need to simplify the law.
Good thing they’re not letting in a bunch of leech, money-sucking refugees! oh wait..
Predators always prey on the weak. Greece did it to themselves with the poison of socialism and free stuff.
The way the world is spunning out of control there is no telling where it all will end. Be prepared.
Investors bought shares in these banks.
The banks sold shares to raise capital.
So what was the ripoff?
The Greece problem was first noted when a clerk in Athens saw a satellite photo of Athens. The clerk noticed that there were many backyard, in-ground swimming pools. The clerk was amazed because a homeowner had to buy a permit to build an in-ground swimming pool.
Nobody had bought a permit.
Now, the Athenians knew they needed a permit, they just ignored the law.
When you start ignoring the little laws, the big criminals come in for the killing.
“You can’t con an honest man.”
But you can con little law breakers.
Now, the big crooks have the people of Greece by the throat and there’s not much they can do because they are all (mostly) little crooks.
They slid down the slippery slope into the mouth of the crocodile.
Ridiculous headline. Everything I’ve been reading about these banks for months is that they are massively insolvent due to owning massive amounts of worthless assets and basically should have been declared to be bankrupt.
Their stock was already trading at near-bankrupt prices anyway; Alpha Bank’s stock, for example was trading for 0.125 euros prior to the buyout.
Those banks are lucky anybody wanted them at all, and if I read this poorly written article correctly, the new owners injected new capital into the banks when they purchased them.
Actually its a shell game. Article says Greek tax payers but they’ve been taking EU money like crazy. Who can say exactly where the funds to bail them out came from over the past four or five years?