By G. Palaitsakis
[email protected]
Tens of thousands of cases of income tax-related investigations in Greece dating from the 2006-2010 period are now considered as permanently closed due to statutes of limitation, with several thousand similar probes dating to 2011 set to close on the last day of 2017.
The development comes after three recent legal opinions issued by the State Legal Council, a judicial review entity under the jurisdiction of the finance ministry, opinions which were partially based on also recently issued rulings by the Council of State (CoS), the top administrative court in the country. Plaintiffs had filed suit with the CoS to force tax authorities and regulatory bodies to adhere to statutes of limitation concerning audits and financial crime investigations. Some of the latter extended over more than a decade,without resolution.
The CoS rulings were immediately applied by the Independent Authority for Public Revenues, itself a memorandum-mandated entity that was established at the start of 2017.
The decision also affects cases, up to 2010, that have been investigated or audited by relevant state authorities but have not been permanently adjudicated by an arbitration council or courts, as well as imposed fines and tax arrears prior to 2010.
Back taxes and fines from confirmed income tax violations during the specific period reach one billion euros, although administrative foot-dragging now means that this figure is lost for state coffers.
The political "hot potato" entailed with alleged widespread tax evasion by wealthy Greeks with overseas bank deposits - an allegation that comprised one of radical leftist SYRIZA's "battering rams" in climbing to power in January 2015 - is also more-or-less defused with the rulings.
For instance, tax authorities over recent years have been supplied with no less than 65 CDs containing data of 1.3 million taxpayers in Greece with large bank deposits between 2000 and 2012, although checks and audits failed to investigate even a large minority of this bloc.
Another very high-profile cache of financial documents is the so-called "Lagarde List" of Greek citizens with deposits at the HSBC branch in Geneva. This list generated countless headlines and newscast reports in Greece dating back to the George Papandreou government, although the "hundreds of millions of euros" that tax authorities and their political supervisors expected to locate in money derived from tax evasion never materialized.
Still another list that now goes by the wayside - at least for the period before 2010 - holds all the data of exported capital to overseas banks, i.e. bank-to-bank transfers.
