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- Athens Olympic Sports Complex OAKA with a ›white elephant‹
When Athens applied for the Olympic Games in 2004 the charge amounted to total of 7,7 billion euros, but today one estimates the real cost for this sport mega-event at 20 to 30 billion euros.
Many Olympic venues in Athens – also known as white elephants – are no longer used and go to rack and ruin, because no one pays for the annual maintenance of 125 million euros.
Only the Siemens Security system C4I, which had never worked in practice, cost nearly 255 million euros.
Until 1998, German companies, which payed bribes abroad, were able to declare these profits simply as beneficial expenditures to avoid tax liability.
That was bad luck for the Siemens company because it saved all bills and receipts and in the course of the Siemens bribery scandal in 2006, one uncovered kickbacks worth several millions euros for the award of the contract for the C4I security system.
Michael Christoforakos, former Siemens chief in Greece, confessed later, that the company in Greece had to pay money to the two major parties, New Democracy and PASOK, so that they would receive contracts from state-owned enterprises.
The Greek government and Siemens Greece ended this affair in 2012 with a deal:
Siemens paid 170 million euros as compensation for damages and invested another 100 million euros in Greece. Furthermore, Siemens apologized officially ›to the public, the Parliament and the Government‹ and in return the Greek government waived for further fines against Siemens in this matter.
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