Galery

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Victoria Mindova

The increase of the taxes for private people and companies which was stipulated in the 2010 budget will be a wrong move on the part of the new government. This was the comment of the president of the Greek Post savings bank Angelos Filipidis regarding the tax reforms of the PASOK government. Filipidis met with journalists and made the balance for the activities of the bank in the past two years. The banker stated that the world practice shows that when an economy is in recession it needs and increase of the liquidity of the market and the tax cuts and the creation of favorable environment for attracting foreign capital and investments are the main techniques which could help in finding the exit of the crisis.

Filipidis gave the example of the neighbor countries like Bulgaria, Cyprus, Serbia which have more favorable conditions for the development of business ventures. He described it as “a lost battle” each time when a corporation or a private person prefers one of these countries to Greece for investing or transferring of the production (in the cases of industrial/production companies). He called the increase of the taxes “a fast solution” which won’t have a permanent stimulus for the growth of the economy in midterm and long term plan.

“The Greek economy will hold to the pressure of the economic crisis. However we have to be prepared for sacrifices”, said Filipidis and also added “I wouldn’t like to pass to my children a Greece which is in a much worst condition than the Greece my father “left” to me and that is why today we all have to make a sacrifice.” The banker gave as an example the chairman of the Bank of Greece Georgios Provopolous who decreased his own salary by 20% and like this setting a personal example in a period of recession.

A main topic of the press conference was the condition of the Post bank in which Angelos Filipidis disclosed some common data about the its current progress. For the first nine months of 2009 the profit before tax was 160,32 million euro and the increase of the shareholders’ capital is about 526,26 million euro. Regardless of the difficult economic situation Post savings bank is at the first place among all Greek banks from the point of view of capital adequacy and it is at the third place among the European banks.