Month: May 2017

Gibraltar is preparing for a post-Brexit setup in which its firms will have no longer access to the European Union market but will maintain a preferential relationship with Britain, a top Gibraltar financial official said on Tuesday.

The tiny British enclave on Spain’s southern tip, with a population of 30,000, is home to around 15,000 companies and is a major provider of insurance and gambling services.

“We are currently planning for a hard Brexit,” James Tipping, director at Gibraltar’s government body for financial promotion, told EU lawmakers in a hearing in Brussels.

He said Gibraltar did not expect to obtain a “special status” and was resigned to lose its access to the EU market after Britain leaves the EU at the end of a process triggered in March by British Prime Minister Theresa May.

This would mark a shift in Gibraltar’s stated policy of seeking extraordinary arrangements with the EU after Brexit.

Many companies have so far been attracted to Gibraltar by the prospect of being able to operate in all 28 EU countries from a territory with low tax rates and business-friendly regulations.

The loss of the access to the EU market, granted to EU member states by so-called passporting rules, may reduce firms’ appetite to establish their headquarters in the British enclave.

But this may not discourage Gibraltar-based firms that operate in the United Kingdom.

“Our financial model will not have to change,” Tipping told lawmakers, noting Britain has committed to guarantee full access to its market for Gibraltar companies.

He said about 20 percent of motor vehicles in Britain are underwritten by Gibraltar-based insurance companies, making insurers the largest financial sector in Gibraltar, which is also home to more than a dozen banks, several investment funds and top online gambling firms.

Gibraltar, often dubbed “the Rock” because of its famous cliff-faced mountain, voted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU at last year’s Brexit referendum.

It remains, however, committed to remain part of Britain after Brexit. The enclave rejected the idea of Britain sharing sovereignty with Spain by 99 percent to 1 percent in a 2002 referendum.

The future of Gibraltar is one of the many thorny issues that will have to be sorted in the two-year divorce talks between Britain and the EU which will end in March 2019.

The EU offered Spain a veto right over the future relationship between Gibraltar and the EU after Britain leaves the bloc.
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Italy will open new detention centers across the country in the next few months as part of its push to speed up deportations of illegal migrants, despite critics saying that the centers are not only inhumane but also do not produce the desired result.

Violent protests and difficulty identifying migrants has led to the closure of similar centers over the past few years, but on Tuesday the Interior Ministry asked regional governments to provide a total of 1,600 beds in such centers.

Interior Minister Marco Minniti says migrants must be detained to stop them from slipping away before they can be sent home.

The plans include reopening one for men at Ponte Galeria on the outskirts of Rome where migrants had sewed their mouths shut in protest before it was destroyed by interned migrants in 2015.

Over the weekend, Reuters journalists visited the still-open female section of the Ponte Galeria center, and spoke to three Nigerian women. All have applied for asylum from behind bars.

Of the 63 women now being held in the center, more than two thirds are awaiting asylum request responses. Twenty-seven are Nigerian, many of them victims of sex trafficking.

Isoke Edionwer, 28, said she was a prostitute for five years, but two years ago paid off her debt and lived in Naples until she was brought to the center a few weeks ago.

“I’m a changed person. I’m no longer a prostitute,” she said. She wants to go back to Naples and earn a living from selling soaps and other items from a shop she opened.

Mass migrant arrivals by sea are putting Italy under increasing pressure. Numbers are up almost 40 percent this year after a record 181,000 came in 2016, and more than 175,000 are being housed in shelters for asylum seekers.

Senator Luigi Manconi of the ruling Democratic Party said the new-style detention centers had been phased out previously because officials working there had failed to determine the real identity and nationality of most migrants for deportation.

“If they didn’t work before, the solution isn’t to create a bunch of new ones,” he told Reuters outside the Ponte Galeria center’s gate, which is guarded by soldiers and police.

In particular, victims of sex trafficking should be helped, not locked up, Manconi said: “Why aren’t they being protected? Are they a threat to the state? No!”

Between 45-50 percent of those held in the new centers were likely to be deported, officials said. Others either cannot be identified or are not accepted by their countries of origin and must be released.

Some 4,000 were deported in 2015, but there are no official numbers yet for 2016.

Happy Idahosa, 20, was picked up by police in the city of Perugia on New Year’s Eve and sent to Ponte Galeria.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “I came to Italy because there is peace and freedom here, and I want to stay.”

 
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Emmanuel Macron, 39, will join the ranks of the world’s youngest leaders when he is inaugurated as president of France on Sunday.

Some leaders past and president who made big marks were even younger when they assumed power.

Fidel Castro

The Cuban revolutionary leader, who died last year, was 32 when his rebel forces took control of Cuba. He ruled for nearly five decades as one of the world’s last communist leaders.

John F. Kennedy

Kennedy was the youngest person ever elected to the presidency of the United States. The wealthy senator and war hero was 43 when he took the oath of office in 1961. But he was not the youngest U.S. president ever — that was Theodore Roosevelt, who was 42 when he took over after the assassination of President William McKinley.

Tony Blair and David Cameron

Blair was 43 when he was elected Britain’s prime minister in 1997 — the country’s youngest leader since 42-year-old Lord Liverpool in 1812.

Cameron was also 43, but a few months younger than Blair, when he became Britain’s leader in 2010.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

Ataturk, the revered founder of the Republic of Turkey, was 42 when he became the country’s first president in 1923. The revolutionary leader’s last name means “Father of the Turks.”

Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson

In Iceland, Gunnlaugsson became prime minister at 38 in 2013. He resigned in 2016 after details of his offshore financial holdings were revealed in the Panama Papers leak.

Moammar Gadhafi

The late Libyan leader was 27 when he seized power in 1969. The dictator held on to power until he was ousted in 2011. He was captured and killed a few months later.

Gamal Abdel Nasser

Nasser was 38 when he became president of Egypt in 1956. He nationalized the Suez Canal and championed the pan-Arab cause, becoming one of the world’s most prominent anti-imperialist figures by the time of his death in 1970.

Kim Jong Un

The North Korean ruler’s age remains something of a mystery, but he is thought to be 32 or 33. Kim, the third generation in North Korea’s ruling dynasty, assumed power in December 2011 upon the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.

Rajiv Gandhi

Gandhi was catapulted to India’s highest office when his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was assassinated in 1984. He began his premiership with promises of modernizing India’s creaking government. Within a few years, he was forced to resign amid allegations of taking bribes in an arms deal. He was assassinated in 1991 while campaigning to return to office.

Justin Trudeau

Trudeau was elected as Canada’s prime minister in 2015, when he was 43. Like Rajiv Gandhi, he had a strong family connection to the office — his father, Pierre Trudeau, also served as prime minister.
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The prospect of an economic doomsday for Greece may have diminished in the past week, but citizen Angelika Dinkel doesn’t much care.

Following months of negotiations, the Greek government last week agreed to further austerity measures in order to access loans from its $94 billion bailout program..

But as she waits in central Athens for a church to open and a hoped-for handout of maybe $5 — or even $10 if she’s lucky —  the 60-year-old’s mind is focused on day-to-day survival.

There may be talk of a light at the end of the tunnel for a country traumatized by seven years of economic turmoil, but on the streets of Athens they seem a world away from everyday reality.

“There’s no reason to pay attention. Things are just getting worse,” says Dinkel, who struggles to scrape together the $50 a month she needs to stay off the streets.  

“No one thought it could be this bad.”

A disconnect

The race is now on for Greek officials rushing to create a bumper package of new legislation agreed to during the negotiations.

These include a cut in taxes, the opening up of energy markets and a further slashing of pensions.

Pending approval from the Greek parliament in the coming days, it is expected the agreement will be ready for the next meeting of eurozone finance ministers on May 22.

There, hopes are that $8 billion in rescue loans will be approved, allowing the country to make a crucial debt repayment in July.

The markets have been largely cheered by the news, while there have been other positive signs too — last month, the country posted its first overall budget surplus in more than two decades.

Yet little of this is being felt on the ground, where poverty and homelessness remain all too prevalent.  

“I don’t think [the latest agreement] will improve the daily lives of people,” claims Aliki Mouriki, a sociologist and senior research fellow at the National Center for Social Research in Athens. “People are seeing further cuts in things like their pensions, so why would they be happy? Some segments of the Greek population and businesses may be happy over [the reforms] as the economic climate has less uncertainty, but this is not reflecting on daily lives.”

Sense of betrayal

The Greek leftist ruling party Syriza and its leader Alexis Tsipras may have emerged with a deal, but the moves have already sparked new protests.

Meanwhile, many consider these latest steps just another act of weakness or betrayal by a party that swept into power on an anti-austerity ticket in 2015.

Though emergency funds from the European Union (EU) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) helped pull Greece back from the brink of collapse in 2010, this is the third such bailout, and many Greeks are of the opinion that the country’s supposed medicine of reforms and austerity is actually proving to be its poison.

Chrysa Lazaridou, who runs a bakery not far from the city’s towering ancient Acropolis, has been keeping an eye on recent developments.

Despite the inclusion of “counter measures” against the austerity — including rent subsidies for low income families — she feels the agreed package represents more of the same when it comes to Greece’s current place in the world.

“I thought [Alexis] Tsipras would be different, but in practice he’s not,” she said.

“All the decisions made here are made outside of Greece in the European Union, while politicians and businessmen will be the ones to profit.”

Vanishing savings

Meanwhile, other signs of progress remain tentative.

Amid the bailouts, reforms and austerity, the unemployment rate has declined from a peak of nearly 28 percent.

However, in recent months it has climbed once again to 23.5 percent — still the highest in Europe — while Friday the European Commission is set to revise its prediction of growth in Greece over 2017 from 2.7 percent to 2 percent.

Panagiotis Lappas, approached by VOA in central Athens, is a banking lawyer who often deals with families overcome by debt — something he sees with increasing regularity.

“Their savings have vanished after seven years,” he explained.

He was circumspect about the latest agreement, stating it was neither “pleasant nor necessary, but maybe now we have no other choice.”

However, in Lappas’ view, the time for austerity is over. More needed to be done, he thought, to stimulate growth and attract investment by lowering business rates.

He also called for debt relief, an issue still at the heart of the debate among creditors regarding Greece, and a pre-condition demanded by the IMF for its participation in this bailout.  

Eyes abroad

Tsipras has talked up the deal as “balanced and sustainable,” but he may find the Greek public even harder to convince than his own party, or those holding the purse strings.

Syriza is badly lagging behind its competitors in the polls, though the true test will come in the country’s elections in 2019.

Meanwhile, for one teenager not yet old enough to vote, the answer may not lie with Tsipras, or any of his political rivals.

Clutching his skateboard in Athens’ Monastiraki neighborhood, 17-year-old Alberto Frangou feels little allegiance to the idea of the EU and is scornful of Greek politicians.  

“I hate them, they’ve not helped us,” he said, telling VOA that he feared entering a job market where youth unemployment was measured at 48 percent in January.

Instead, he is considering another option, one that potentially spells more trouble for Greece in the coming years.

Between 2008 and 2016, around 450,000 mostly young and educated people left the country in search of a better future.

“If things don’t get any better, then I will just have to go elsewhere,” he told VOA.
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Czech President Milos Zeman on Monday demanded his prime minister terminate the agreement that formed the coalition government if he is to agree to firing the finance minister, deepening a rift between the country’s two leaders.

The European Union member is in political crisis over the future of Finance Minister Andrej Babis, a billionaire businessman who faces questions over past business practices and is the main political rival of Prime Minister Bohuslav Sobotka.

With an election due in October, Sobotka is demanding the president dismiss Babis, but the finance minister, who heads the anti-establishment ANO party, has found an ally in Zeman who has long had poor relations with the prime minister.

Sobotka, who heads the center-left Social Democrats, asked Zeman on Friday to dismiss Babis by May 9, but the president has refused to do so.

“The president stated that the prime minister cannot task the president with setting a date for dismissal,” the presidency said in a statement issued after Zeman met Babis on Monday.

Under the constitution, the president dismisses a minister if requested by the prime minister. Lawyers say the head of state should act promptly and has little wiggle room.

However, on Monday Zeman said Sobotka’s and Babis’s parties were bound by coalition agreement — reached in 2014 to form the cabinet — and that the prime minister must pull out of the deal before requesting Babis’ dismissal against the minister’s will.

“A termination of the coalition agreement would be needed for a valid dismissal,” the statement said.

Such a move could trigger the coalition government’s collapse. Last Friday the prime minister took back a pledge to resign along with his whole government in order to dislodge Babis.

Zeman also wanted to see a nomination for a replacement, the statement added.

Sobotka later urged the Zeman to respect the constitution.

“I would like to call on Mr. President to respect the fundamental law of our country. The coalition agreement has nothing to do with that,” the prime minister said in a statement.

Sobotka has said Babis failed to clear suspicions he dodged taxes by buying tax-free bonds from his conglomerate Agrofert.

Babis says he has not violated any laws.

The EU’s fraud office and Czech police have also been investigating whether Babis manipulated ownership of a conference center to unfairly qualify for EU subsidies meant for small businesses.

Babis has said the prime minister’s actions are politically motivated ahead of parliamentary elections in October. Babis’ ANO party enjoys a more-than 10 point lead over the Social Democrats, according to opinion polls.
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