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Fourteen offshore companies that for years have not paid taxes worth € 25.9 million for their luxury properties in Halkidiki, Thessaloniki, Katerini and Pieria got caught in the net of the service prosecuting financial crimes.
 
Two of the offshore companies even had no tax number and operated as phantom companies without being bothered by the tax services. The firms were found after cross-checking the data of tax offices, urban planning services, land registry and even the space photographs of the electronic application Google Earth.

The amount of tax evasion, which is usually due to not paying taxes on expensive properties, is very clear in the example of one of the offshore companies, which were discovered in Polygyros, in the Halkidiki peninsula. The company with initials N.A. will have to pay taxes to the amount of € 21,288,000 from the total € 25,988,000, which tax officers revealed for the first 14 cases alone.

The second most wealthy of the offshore companies is W.T. International Limited, which will have to pay € 2.471 million for its properties in Thessaloniki. The third on the list is P. Limited, which is one of the companies without a tax number. However, the offshore company owns property worth millions in Polygyros, for which it will have to pay over € 762,000 and this amount does not include penalties and accrued interest.

Offshore companies are accused of not paying the additional tax of 3 per cent of the actual value of the property from 2003 to 2009 and 15 percent for 2010 and 2011, tax on large real estate by 2006, an extra property tax for the period 2007 to 2009 and real estate property tax in 2010.

Sources from the Ministry of Finance are certain that these amounts will be collected because the amount of tax evasion combined with more stringent penalties for offenders, which include not only fast-track arrest but also property confiscation and auctioning, will force the owners to pay the money to the state funds.

According to them, not all offshore companies were established for the purposes of tax evasion because there are some that do pay their obligations, although these are the exception that proves the rule. The stricter inspections by the office prosecuting financial crimes are already producing results. In Kranidi, offshore companies paid € 280,000 in property taxes last month alone. In comparison, taxes paid in recent years did not exceed the amount of € 50,000 per year.

At the same time, the issues of the measures the government is taking against major debtors to the state has provoked a dispute between former deputy Minister of Finance, Dimitris Kouselas, and the present Minister, Evangelos Venizelos, which subsequently led to a prosecution intervention.

During the meeting of the PASOK parliamentary group, the "king" of the Greek economy responded strongly to Dimitris Kouselas’ question of what measures are being taken against the "big fish" and asked him what he himself had done during his term in the Ministry of Finance.

According to posts in the Greek press, the former deputy minister replied that he had submitted to the then Minister George Papaconstantinou a list of people owing large amounts to the state and related this to the fact that he was no longer in the ministry after the June reshuffle. Then Dimitris Kouselas said to reporters that the list contained the names of 3,800 Greeks, each of whom owed taxes amounting to over one million euros.

The former Minister of Finance George Papaconstantinou commented on the list, "there is no such thing." However, he said, "As we have pointed out many times, there is the obligation to disclose the list of names of the citizens owing taxes. There is a procedure followed by the Ministry of Finance and the office for combating financial crimes."

New Democracy asked for "concrete answers and complete explanations of the statements of the former Deputy Minister Dimitris Kouselas". Deputies from the far-right party LAOS asked a parliamentary question and requested clarification of the truth of the former Deputy Minister’s allegations and of the intentions of the government if the allegations proved to be grounded. The spokesman of the Democratic Alliance, Dimitris Zafiriadis, called for clarification and full disclosure.

The prosecutor of the Supreme Court assigned the case to prosecutor Poppy Papandreou, who will investigate whether non-political persons have committed crimes such as fraud to the detriment of the state.