Also known as Maria da Fronteira, she is a landmark in the promotion of ‘Mulheres Ciganas’ in Portugal.
LAGARDE LIST, Europe’s most dangerous list of tax evaders
THIS STORY WAS TOLD TO US BY OUR ESC VOLUNTEER: PANOS, 25 YEARS OLD, GREEK.
The former Greek finance minister, Giorgos Papakonstantinou, has been accused of removing the names of three of his relatives from the so-called ‘Lagarde list’, a document containing the names of hundreds of possible Greek tax evaders with deposits in Switzerland.
The Lagarde List is a spreadsheet containing some 2,000 potential tax evaders with undeclared accounts at the Geneva branch of the Swiss bank HSBC.
It is named after former French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, who passed it on to Greek officials in October 2010 to help them crack down on tax evasion.
In 2006 and 2007, an IT technician, Hervé Falciani, allegedly stole the bank’s data, containing the names of clients from several EU countries, and tried to sell them to different governments. In January 2009, the police raided Falciani’s French home and found computer files on 130,000 potential tax evaders (24,000 from all over Europe) and started investigating them. The French government then passed the information to selected European governments such as the UK to help them crack down on tax evasion.le.
In early summer 2010, the French intelligence service DGSE informed the (then) head of the Greek National Intelligence Agency that many of those named in the Falciani dossier were Greeks and that the French authorities were ready to hand over a list containing the names of wealthy Greek depositors in Swiss banks to help the Greek government crack down on tax evaders.
The Greek intelligence chief then informed the former finance minister of the George Papandreou government, Giorgos Papakonstantinou, who accepted this information in a meeting with the then French finance minister Christine Lagarde, on condition that it remained secret.
In October 2010, Lagarde sent a list of 1,991 names to Papakonstantinou through diplomatic channels in the form of an unlabelled CD containing spreadsheets for the approximately 2,000 accounts now known in Greece as the ‘Lagarde list’.
Papakonstantinou then stated during a parliamentary enquiry that he had ‘handed over all files to the new head of the tax police’ – the Economic and Financial Crimes Unit of Greece (SDOE) – ‘and asked him to proceed with a full investigation’. However, the tax authorities chose not to proceed and Papakonstantinou left office in mid-2011 and the CD disappeared.
Papakonstantinou’s successor, Evangelos Venizelos, produced a copy on a memory stick and launched a limited investigation to check whether any of those listed had evaded taxes. The investigation concerned only a dozen or so politicians and no legal action was taken.
It was only when the then new finance minister Yannis Stournaras asked Paris for another copy that Venizelos admitted that he had forgotten the memory stick in a private office and lost it.
On 28 October 2012, Greek journalist and editor Kostas Vaxevanis claimed to be in possession of the list and published 2,056 names on it in his magazine Hot Doc. The next day, he was arrested for violation of privacy laws, an offence with a possible sentence of up to two years in prison. Three days later, Vaxevanis was tried and found not guilty.
Greek journalist and editor Kostas Vaxevanis
The way the public services handle the list issue remains unclear, to this day.
Many of the names on the list have been cleared of charges, to this day the Greek people still have no clear picture of the issue and a world-known scandal like this has been left in the labyrinth of the Greek bureaucracy.
In January 2011, Italian newspapers began to publish the first rumours about the Italian part of the Lagarde list. According to some, the list would contain the names of around 7,000 Italians, including numerous celebrities. Almost two years after its receipt, however, the Falciani list has not produced any results.
Various tax commissions and other courts have ruled that the list is unusable: the data was stolen and therefore cannot be used as evidence in court.
ESC FACTOR, Stories of Europe:
The communication campaign ESC FACTOR, Stories of Europe was born from the experience of a workshop on multi-channel communication that further enriched the personal background of the young volunteers of the ESC project, European Solidarity Corps who have been living for months at Il paguro Ostello, a small house for young Europeans, a property confiscated from the Casalesi family in which Giosef Italy has created a youth hostel, in Casapesenna.
During the past few months, the young people involved have had the opportunity to learn about the history of Italy, through a series of meetings whose main theme was the history of the Antimafia.
From the realisation that such an important and well-known history in our country is often ignored by other young Europeans, this project was born.
We said to ourselves, what if we now tell our readers stories that changed the history of your home countries but are not known by the Italian public?
Thus was born the idea of THE ESC FACTOR, a project to share stories of movements and people who have only one thing in common: the courage of freedom, the desire for justice, the fight for the affirmation of civil rights, in all their forms, beyond all borders.
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