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Tag: euro

  • EU Corruption Costs Over €120 Billion A Year

    An official EU report published Monday says corruption affects all member countries of the European Union and costs the bloc at least 120 billion euros ($162 billion) annually. She said the amount lost annually would be enough to fund the Union’s yearly operating budget.

    The report was issued by European Commissioner Cecelia Malmstrom during the first official European Union corruption study. Malmstrom said the estimated loss was due to secret political financing, inflated government contracts, bribes and other corrupt practices.

    “There are no corruption-free zones in Europe,” Malmstrom told a news conference. “We are not doing enough. And this is true for all member states.”

    Although the study does not rank the countries according to the pervasiveness of corruption, Malmstrom said “younger democracies” especially in Eastern Europe face some special challenges.

    According to the report, corruption can be found at both the local and regional levels of government and for some member countries it is especially prevalent in the healthcare and real estate sectors.

    Malmstrom pointed out that many government contracts get inflated. She said government financed goods and services make up about 20% of the EU spending and that up to 25% of the money spent is lost in corruption dealings.

    In one of the surveys, about 4 out of 10 privately owned companies cited corruption as one of the main obstacles to doing business in EU.

    “A huge amount of money is lost here,” Malmstrom said.

    European Commissioner continued to say the taxpayer’s money is not used properly and citizens don’t get a good return for their money. She also said that corruption “erodes democratic legitimacy.”

    The Director of the European Union office of Transparency International Carl Dolan welcomed the reports, saying it came at the right time when voters will be electing a new EU parliament. “What the report shows is that there has been a consistent failure among politicians to regulate their conflicts of interests, particularly in their dealings with business and industry,” Dolan said.

    Image via YouTube

  • Germany Elections: Can Angela Merkel Save Aging, Dying Europe?

    Chancellor Angela Merkel’s political party won Germany’s national elections on Sunday and was poised to register close to a majority in German parliament.

    Merkel, therefore, is slated to be only the third German leader since World-War II to win a third straight term. The other two leaders to win three terms in a row were Konrad Adenauer and Helmut Kohl, who presided over the unification of East and West Germany and witnessed the dissolution of Soviet Empire.

    The final tally and behind the scenes political maneuvering will determine which smaller parties end up in parliament, and which ones will enter into marriage with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union to form a “grand coalition”.

    While Germany and other European countries have gone through the democratic motions, Europe’s debt and demographic crisis has seen no signs of abatement, let alone a healthy reversal.

    As the largest economy of Europe and its most populous entity, which way Germany is nudged by the international banking community in order to handle Europe’s debt crisis will determine whether Europeans will be demographically viable or extinct at the end of 21st century.

    “This is a super result…I see the next four years in front of me and I can promise that we will face many tasks, at home, in Europe and in the world,” Merkel said, during a closely monitored televised appearance with other party functionaries.

    Aware that Merkel may not eventually gain absolute majority, her defeated center-left challenger and ex-Finance Minister Peer Steinbrueck, who railed against Keynesian economics during the 2008 financial crisis, said, “The ball is in Merkel’s court…She has to get herself a majority.”

    While some within Germany have insisted on austerity and retrenchment, the international banking community led by Bank for International Settlements has been spearheading the charge for more inflationary monetary policies to “boost” growth.

    Growth, however, has become a forbidden territory, as Europe is dying out. While native-European deaths far outpace births, immigrant populations arriving by the millions every year from West Asia and Africa are making their presence felt, resulting in a demographic transformation unprecedented since the Mongol Empire under Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan.

    Merkel’s electoral coalition won ~42% of the vote, up more than 8% from 2009 elections, based on exit polls and incomplete counts. But it is not clear what exactly are Merkel’s conservatives conserving when German population is well on its way to extinction due to ultra-low annual births and skyrocketing deaths.

    Nevertheless, according to Merkel, “We will do everything together in the next four years to make them successful years for Germany.” Well, what about the next 100 years? Has long term thinking and vision completely vanished from Merkel’s mind?

    Steinbrueck’s SPD party trailed well behind Merkel’s CDU party at 26.5% of votes, while the Left Party garnered 8.5%. The Left Party includes elements of former East Germany’s political class and staunchly opposes costly NATO military belligerence and bail-outs for bankrupt PIGS (Portugal-Italy-Greece-Spain).

    While Merkel touted her second term as “the most successful government since reunification,” most of Europe including Germany is sinking in a tsunami of debt, unemployment and low fertility.

    So what are we to make of the German elections and Merkel’s coming third term? Not much, as the crisis that faces Europe goes beyond fiscal gymnastics, monetary heroin and tax adjustments.

    It is a civilizational crisis, where the two fundamental life-giving institutions, family and religiosity, are exiting from society, leaving Europe a land facing interesting times.

    [images from wikipedia and US census]

  • Hackers Break Into Banks And Steal 60 Million Euros

    McAfee and Guardian Analytics released a joint report today saying that more than 60 firms have suffered from what it has called an “insider level of understanding.” The automated malicious software program was discovered and it was designed to use servers to process thousands of attempted thefts from both businesses and private individuals.

    “The fraudsters’ objective in these attacks is to siphon large amounts from high balance accounts, hence the name chosen for this research – Operation High Roller,” the report said. “If all of the attempted fraud campaigns were as successful as the Netherlands example we describe in this report, the total attempted fraud could be as high as 2 billion euro.”

    What makes this crime so different is that the hackers were able to get into the bank servers and install constructed software that is automated. Because it is on the inside, it is able to get around the normal alarms that alert the system of abnormalities and do its job. Which is to siphon money out of large accounts.

    MacAfee has identified a bunch of servers being used for this crime. “They have identified 60 different servers, many of them in Russia, and they have identified one alone that has been used to steal 60 million euro,” Sky News defense and security editor Sam Kiley said.

    The 60 million euros that have been taken are all that has been identified so far, but this has the ability to be one of the largest thefts of money in the history of the world.

  • Angela Merkel Pushes for Structural Reform

    Angela Merkel, German Chancellor and leader of the Christian Democratic Union, has urged struggling European nations to embrace structural reform in order to rescue their faltering economies. According to AFP, Merkel stated in a recent speech that she was against taking on more debt as a means to an end. She also touched on the Spanish bailout, which she said will come with “strings attached”.

    “There will of course be conditionality for Spain, when the application comes, namely a restructuring of its own banking system to make it fit for the future,” Merkel explained.

    Although French President Francois Hollande has called for a regional growth strategy to keep the European economy from collapsing entirely, Merkel feels that governments shouldn’t come to rely on bailouts and financial spending to pull themselves out of the hole. She insisted that in order to properly move ahead, “we must learn from the mistakes of the past”.

    In regards to the Spanish bailout, Merkel explained that she supported the idea, stating that the country was taking the necessary steps to correct the issues its currently facing. “I think it is right that Spain is now applying to recapitalize its banks, because the banking problems have not been caused by the state of the economic reforms but by a property bubble over the past decade.”

    Merkel also insisted that reforms, the sort employed by Germany to help turn around their economy, aren’t going to happen overnight. In fact, it may take time for countries to see results of their endeavors.

    “This encourages us to say in Europe that structural reforms can produce extremely good result,” she said, adding that the country had paid the price for its current success.