Andrew Cuomo chides Greeks for not paying taxes and betting horses and offers Greece free use of Turbotax so that the books of Greece will be just like those of New York State!
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Confidential > Stop
scratching on holidays
Stop scratching on holidays
Published: June 1, 2012
Off Track Betting in New York State has been racing into a crisis called shrinking revenue. Some people have spitballed a solution: Don’t close on holidays.
New York State Racing Law bars racing on Christmas, Easter and Palm Sunday, and the state has ruled OTBs can’t handle action on those days, even though they could easily broadcast races from out of state.
“You should be able to bet whenever you want,” said Jackson Leeds, a Nassau OTB employee who makes an occasional bet. He added some irrefutable logic: “How is the business going to make money if you’re not open to take people’s bets?”
Elias Tsekerides, president of the Federation of Hellenic Societies of Greater New York, said OTB is open on Greek Orthodox Easter and Palm Sunday.
“I don’t want discrimination,” Tsekerides said. “They close for the Catholics, but open for the Greek Orthodox? It’s either open for all or not open.”
OTB officials have said they lose millions by closing on Palm Sunday alone, with tracks such as Gulfstream, Santa Anita, Turf Paradise and Hawthorne running.
One option: OTBs could just stay open and face the consequences. New York City OTB did just that back in 2003. The handle was about $1.5 million – and OTB was fined $5,000.
Easy money.
Greece Seeks to Make War Reparations Part of Debt Debate
Germany Rejects New Greek Government’s Call for Billions of Euros in WWII Reparations
ENLARGE
Greece's new Prime
Minister Alexis Tsipras visits a shooting-range site on the outskirts of
Athens in January. Members of the Greek Resistance were executed by
Nazi occupation forces at the site during World War II.
Photo:
Reuters
Greece, Mr. Tsipras said in his inaugural address in parliament, has “a moral obligation to our people, to history, to all European peoples who fought and gave their blood against Nazism” to pursue the reparations. The country was ravaged during the Germans’ four-year occupation, a history that remains fresh despite the passage of time.
The leftist prime minister’s move to confront Germany with what most Greeks see as Berlin’s outstanding debt to Athens is a theme that has played out repeatedly in his first days in power, as the new government has tried to use a mix of economic argument and moral suasion to win leniency from its creditors.
ENLARGE
During a trip to Berlin last week, Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis recalled the period that led to the Nazis’ rise to power. “No one understands better than the people of this land how a severely depressed economy, combined with a ritual national humiliation and unending hopelessness can hatch the serpent’s egg within its society,” he said.
The dramatic rhetoric has changed few minds in Berlin, where officials regard it as a political ploy by the new government in Athens to distract attention from its refusal to adhere to its bailout program.
Yet Greek officials’ repeated references to unpaid wartime debt and reparations holds a legal dimension as well.
Berlin insists the reparations issue is resolved. Over the past 70 years, Germany has paid tens of billions of dollars to other states and Nazi victims. That includes about $54 million to Greece and its citizens in the 1950s and early 1960s, an amount that would be roughly $450 million today when adjusted for inflation.
The dispute reopens a chapter in postwar history that the German government would rather leave closed. Berlin worries that any concession toward Greece on reparations could trigger similar demands by a host of other countries it subjugated during the reign of Nazi terror. “The likelihood (of further reparations) is zero because the legal situation is quite clear,” German Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel said.
Some Greek politicians claim Germany owes the country more than €160 billion ($181 billion) in reparations.
Much of the reparations Germany paid was in the form of factories and other infrastructure that were disassembled and shipped elsewhere, making it difficult to attach a value, said Matthias Hartwig, an expert in international law with the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, who has studied the issue. But the accounting for the reparations was haphazard. And in many cases Germany property was simply seized, particularly by the Soviets, without any documentation.
By its own account, the German government paid about $20 billion in reparations to other states, primarily the Soviet Union, in the decades following the war. In addition, Germany lost about one-fifth of its original territory and untold billions of dollars in intellectual property.
Under pressure from the U.S. and its other NATO allies, Greece settled for just $25 million from Germany in the 1950s—about $220 million in today’s dollars—though the Greek government at the time sought as much as $10 billion.
Germany also paid about 115 million deutsche marks, or $29 million, in the early 1960s to Greek victims of Nazi crimes, mostly Jews, in the early 1960s. That amount would be worth about $230 million in today’s dollars.
Berlin argues that the reparations question was settled by a treaty among the then-two Germanys and the World War II allied powers in 1990. That treaty, known informally as the Two Plus Four Agreement, was designed to put all war-related claims to rest in the run-up to German reunification.
Legal scholars are divided over whether the Two Plus Four treaty has closed the door on further reparation claims. Still, the passage of time and Germany’s refusal to engage on the issue makes it unlikely Greece has much hope to win further damages from Berlin, they say.
“Such agreements are normally concluded right after the cessation of hostilities,” Mr. Hartwig said. “To come up with such a contract 70 years later would be a first.”
Greek officials say that even if they have no legal right to reparations, Germany should at least pay back a loan Greece was forced to make to Berlin in 1942. Germany compelled Greece’s puppet government during the war to lend it 465 million Reichmarks, ostensibly to pay for the occupation. Greek officials maintain the loan amount would be worth about €11 billion today.
But Germany says that because the loan was coerced—the loan agreement included no interest, for example—it shouldn’t be classified as outstanding debt, but as a further instance of Germany’s plundering of the country. As such, claims related to the forced loan would be covered by reparations Germany has already paid.
Write to Matthew Karnitschnig at matthew.karnitschnig@wsj.com
