Έτσι αυτό είναι ένα πρόβλημα. Οι πηγές χρηματοδότησης του εμπορίου στερεύουν και επομένως έτσι και το εμπόριο.Αλλά υπάρχει και ένα δεύτερο πρόβλημα, όπως το Reuters και το Alphaville επισημαίνουν. Οι εισαγωγές φυσικού αερίου θα μπορούσαν να στεγνώσουν αρκετά σύντομα. Οι εισαγωγές αυτές περνούν από μία κρατική εταιρεία, την ΔΕΠΑ, η οποία στη συνέχεια μεταπωλεί σε εταιρείες παραγωγής ηλεκτρικής ενέργειας.
Αλλά η ΔΕΗ δεν πληρωνει την ΔΕΠΑ και έτσι η ΔΕΠΑ δεν έχει χρήματα να πληρώσει για τις εισαγωγές.
Ένας λόγος για αυτή την έλλειψη χρημάτων είναι ότι κάποιος είχε μια φαεινή ιδέα λίγους μήνες πριν, να πρόσθεσει τους φόρους ακινήτων στους λογαριασμούς του ηλεκτρικού ρεύματος.
Σε καποιο σημείο οι άνθρωποι σταμάτησαν να πληρώνουν τους λογαριασμούς τους για την ηλεκτρική ενέργεια: έτσι, δεν υπάρχουν χρήματα για τις εταιρείες ηλεκτρισμού, ούτε για την ΔΕΠΑ και κατά συνέπεια υπάρχει κίνδυνος να διακοπει η εισαγωγη φυσικού αερίου.
Μετάφραση αποσπάσματος: LEFTeria-news
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/06/01/the-lights-are-going-out-in-greece/
The Lights Are Going Out in Greece
The old line is that would the last person to leave the country please turn the lights out? And it’s beginning to look like in Greece that there won’t be any lights long before the last person has left. And given that artificial illumination is really a pretty good measure of an industrial society, so much so that some economists measure the wealth of places by how much light can be seen from satellites, this doesn’t bode well for Greece at all. Does it?
Reuters is claiming an exclusive on this story but that’s not really quite true. Some of their details are:
Greece’s debt crisis threatened to turn into an energy crunch on Friday, with the power regulator calling an emergency meeting next week to avert a collapse of the country’s electricity and natural gas system.
Regulator RAE called the emergency meeting after receiving a letter from Greece’s natural gas company DEPA, dated May 31 and seen by Reuters, threatening to cut supplies to electricity producers if they failed to settle their arrears with the company.
The FT’s Alphaville had part of the story yesterday.
There are two quite different problems here. The first is that no one is willing to offer Greece trade terms any more. No one has been accepting letters of credit drawn on a Greek bank for months now. Meaning that oil imports, among others, are something of a problem. They dealt with that by taking Iranian oil, which was offered on very generous payment terms. This is no longer possible because of EU sanctions against Iran. There are only two companies left willing to supply Greece, Glencore and
Vitoil, both at premiums to the market price.
You can’t even get trade credit insurance on shipping into Greece any more.
So that’s one problem. The sources of trade finance are drying up and so therefore is trade.
But there is a second problem as both Reuters and Alphaville point out. Natural gas imports might dry up soon enough. These imports go through one state company, DEPA, which then sells on to the electricity generating companies. But they are not paying DEPA, so DEPA has no money to pay for the imports.
One reason for this lack of money is that someone had a bright idea a few months back. Greeks, famously, do not pay property taxes. So, they added the property taxes to the electricity bills. At which point people stopped paying their electricity bills: so, no money for the electricity companies, none for DEPA and thus the risk of gas imports stopping.
So, in contrast to the old joke at the top the question now to ask is, will there actually be any lights to turn out before the country is empty?
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