The Greek procurator’s office accused Father Efraim of striking a number of deals in exchanging several cheap plots of land belonging to Vatopedi for expensive property in Athens. Investigators believe that these deals caused the loss of at least 100 million Euros to the government. Fr Efraim himself declared his innocence and rejected the charges against him. He’ll stay under arrest until the end of the court proceedings. Because of of his heath condition the abbot will be taken to a prison hospital in Thessaloniki.

Also see 1159 of our old weblog (without photos).

This brings me to something else: I have been waiting for almost 4 months for our old weblog to return, but unfortunately the pictures are still missing. As you can see, at least all posts are back on athos.weblog.nl and the texts did return in the meanwhile, so I have hope the pictures will follow one day, That is why I decided the start publishing again on athos.weblog.nl from the 1st of January 2012. Hope to see back on our old adress.

Wim, 26/12

"Two senior monks from the Vatopedi Monastery, which has been implicated in an allegedly corrupt land-swap deal with the state, were yesterday (21th of december 2010) given 10-month suspended jail sentences by an appeals court in Thrace for being moral accomplices to a breach of duty. Ephraim, the monastery’s former chief monk, and Arsenios, its ex-financial manager, were accused of colluding with Maria Psalti, the former judge of a first instance court in Rhodope, northern Greece, where tracts of land involved in the swap are located. Psalti also received a 10-month suspended sentence for delaying making public a ruling on the ownership of the land" (from: ekathimerini.com).

Fathers Arsenios and Efraim

Another greek site quotes: "Impunity continues in Greece".

Wim, 5/1

The Vanity Fair of October 1st publishes this article by Michael Lewis: Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds.

In this long but very interesting article you read about Greek financial crisis and the role of Vatopediou. The writer visited the monastery and had a long conversation with the financial man of the monastery, Father Arsenios.

Here a part of his article:

That changed on October 4 of last year, when the Greek government turned over. A scandal felled the last government and sent Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis packing, which perhaps is not surprising. What’s surprising was the nature of the scandal. In late 2008, news broke that Vatopaidi had somehow acquired a fairly worthless lake and swapped it for far more valuable government-owned land. How the monks did this was unclear—paid some enormous bribe to some government official, it was assumed. No bribe could be found, however. It didn’t matter: the furor that followed drove Greek politics for the next year. The Vatopaidi scandal registered in Greek public opinion like nothing in memory. “We’ve never seen a movement in the polls like we saw after the scandal broke,” the editor of one of Greece’s leading newspapers told me. “Without Vatopaidi, Karamanlis is still the prime minister, and everything is still going on as it was before.” Dimitri Contominas, the billionaire creator of a Greek life-insurance company and, as it happens, owner of the TV station that broke the Vatopaidi scandal, put it to me more bluntly: “The Vatopaidi monks brought George Papandreou to power.”

Father Arsenios the CFO of Vatopediou 

Here an example how buseness was done:

For instance, after a famous Spanish singer visited and took an interest in Vatopaidi, he parlayed the interest into an audience with government officials from Spain. They were told a horrible injustice had occurred: in the 14th century a band of Catalan mercenaries, upset with the Byzantine emperor, had sacked Vatopaidi and caused much damage. The monastery received $240,000 from the government officials.

It takes a while to read the whole article, but I think it is worth it, because it explains a lot about the current situation in Greece and the mentality of some Greeks (how NOT to pay taxes)!

Wim, 17/9 (thanks to our reader Art)

Giannis has found a recent pdf with a statement by the Vatopedi monastery about the controversial landdeal with the Greek government.
hv