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The lawyers – not the money, the human material is the problem

According to the lawyer Dimitris Paraskevas, nobody can say whether mergers are good or bad, because each case is specific. JPMorgan is an example of a successful merger. Bank of America and Meryll Lynch is an example of a failed merger as it immediately became the biggest problem of America, is his opinion. He said if it comes to debt reduction, the banks would face serious difficulties, because they are very open to government bonds. He also said that the Greek banking problem won’t be solved if no foreign bank buys a large Greek bank. Neither the state, nor the banks themselves can solve the problem of liquidity. So, others’ money is needed. He said he feels sorry for those who will lose their jobs, but this may be a new opportunity for them and will be very healthy for the banking system.

He stressed that not only money is a problem in Greece. The problem is the human material. Dimitris Paraskevas said that the laws in Greece fail because they are written by politicians who want to send certain political messages through them, not by people on the market who know the problems. He gave as an example the law on capital return, according to which only capital stock can return to Greek banks that was in the name of the payer on the day of the law publishing and the payer has no tax obligations to the country. According to him, this automatically excludes people having serious capital abroad. He said that there are no good economists in the public sector. In England, for example, the former head of HSBC will be the next minister of commerce. The law in Greece says that those who have an off-shore company can not hold a public post. This automatically excludes all those who have accumulated billions of shipping, for example. Why to exclude such capable people from the public sector, asked rhetorically Dimitris Paraskevas.