DW: The Greeks’ nightmare is over – The country remains a “problem” child of the eurozone

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FAZ report on Greece, which is coming out of enhanced supervision. Problems for Soltz too because of the Cum-Ex scandal

“The nightmare of the Greeks is over,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung solemnly writes in the financial section of the paper. The EU exempts Athens from enhanced surveillance on August 20. But Greece remains the problem child of the Eurozone as FAZ comments.

After three memoranda in 2010, 2011/12 and 2015 and extensive reforms, proud Greeks felt the continued presence of the troika as a challenge and a nightmare – precisely because the institutions were not only concerned with saving but mainly with structural reforms, which the Greeks perceived it more as demands for austerity and as interference in Greek politics.

Greece, however, remains a special case, and only because of its high debt. Some loans Greece received for the euro crisis do not expire until 2060, which will continue to weigh on the Greek national budget for a long time to come despite favorable conditions. Even so, the end of increased surveillance is an important step, comments FAZ.

“I don’t know and I don’t remember anything”

On the other hand, for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, the nightmare now seems to be just beginning. After his testimony to a special parliamentary inquiry committee in Hamburg into the Warbung Bank Cum-Ex tax evasion scandal from his time as governor of Hamburg, the Welt newspaper called him “a man without a memory”.

The chancellor, according to the newspaper, followed a strange line of defense that casts doubt on his credibility: “He knows and remembers nothing.” Although he did not deny meetings with bankers of the controversial bank in the past, after the journalists highlighted them in 2020, however, as he said, he does not remember the content of the discussions. “I had no political influence on the tax procedure followed for Warburg Bank,” he said.

In the Cum-Ex scandal, the participants in the Cum-Ex trades exchanged shares with the right to dividend (Cum) or without the right to dividend (Ex) so often and in a short period of time that the true identity of the beneficiary and indeed the protagonists were lost to claim multiple tax refunds after the successive transfers.

In recent weeks, criticism of the chancellor has grown increasingly intense: deleted email accounts and investigations into close confidants of Olaf Solz brought the chancellor as a witness to the commission of inquiry. And this image according to Welt will follow Solz throughout his chancellorship. Someone who can’t remember anything can’t banish shadows.

Before Scholz’s deposition, CDU leader Friedrich Merz sharply criticized the chancellor. “Unfortunately, I have to say it so clearly: I don’t believe a word of what the chancellor says,” Mertz told the Handelsblatt newspaper. It is “completely unbelievable” that Soltz does not remember such a serious event in his hometown.

Diplomatic episode against the backdrop of environmental disaster

The death of fish in the Oder River between Germany and Poland is raising tensions between the two countries, which accuse each other of negligence in dealing with the environmental disaster, according to the Frankfurter Allgemeine. For more than three weeks, animals and plants have been dying in the area around the border river.

The German side criticized the fact that Poland sent an official report to Germany only on August 11 – and only after Brandenburg reported the incident to the neighboring country.

The Polish politician from the ruling PiS party criticized German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who, unlike the Polish prime minister, had yet to travel to the Oder River. “I did not see the German chancellor on the banks of the Oder, although this is our common river,” he said.

The environmental disaster is due, according to Berlin’s Tageszeitung newspaper, to toxic algae, which need a high salt content for rapid growth. Climate change promotes, according to the paper, the growth of species of algae in running water that are otherwise mostly found in brackish water: lots of light, low water levels, slow flow, this gives the algae time to grow.

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