'Soiled hands'

8 July 2011 Last updated at 10:22 GMT News that Britain's biggest tabloid, the News of the World, is to close suddenly after a phone hacking scandal has made headlines across Europe, generating revulsion at the paper's methods and questions about the future of its owner, Rupert Murdoch.

The NOTW was accused of hacking into phones of crime victims, celebrities and politicians, with police identifying 4,000 possible targets.

"The World closes ranks against the News", is how gazeta.ru, a popular liberal online newspaper in Russia, put the story.

Germany's biggest tabloid, Bild, gave a fairly straight account of the demise of "one of the UK's most aggressive tabloids".

While the German paper is famous for its photos of topless women and its pursuit of candid celebrity photographs, German media have to report under stringent privacy laws.

It was left to one of the German broadsheets, Die Welt, to comment on the ethics of the scandal.

Under the headline "When journalists exploit unimaginable suffering", it said the NOTW had "crossed moral and legal boundaries".

'Historic first'

France's Nouvel Observateur magazine ran an analysis piece by Mathieu Geniole titled "A legendary newspaper buried in secret".

"A whole institution is vanishing... a thick Sunday tabloid that soiled the hands both literally and figuratively," he wrote.

So great was the shock, he said, that its online edition gave no indication it was closing, and continued to offer four-week subscriptions on Thursday.

He noted the NOTW had first made headlines in France in the 1990s with its "mad quest to identify England's paedophiles street by street".

The lingering image of the NOTW, he argued, was that of a tabloid "which stops at nothing to sell copy at the risk of ruining itself and becoming the first paper in the world to fold for a reason other than voluntary liquidation".

Political consequences

Writing with disgust in Belgium's Le Soir, media analyst Jean-Paul Marthoz referred to NOTW reporters as "journalists" only in quotation marks.

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Papers like Le Parisien in France or Newsday in New York have shown you can be both 'wider public' and respectable”

End Quote Jean-Paul Marthoz Le Soir "Papers like Le Parisien in France or Newsday in New York have shown you can be both 'wider public' and respectable," he said.

"But papers like The New York Post and the News of the World belong to another world where the editors, the 'reporters' and also the readers jointly engage in transgressing the basic principles of human dignity and respect for privacy, and spreading rumours and stereotypes."

"But it is true," he added, "that British politicians - Tony Blair yesterday, David Cameron today - fawn on 'popular' press baron Rupert Murdoch and have not dared shun a man who uses his newspapers astutely to advance his political and financial interests."

Spanish liberal newspaper La Razon chose to lead on Mr Murdoch, suggesting the media magnate's political influence had been weakened.

"When all is said and done, the Sunday paper has always held the keys to Downing Street - the candidate backed by its cover was the candidate who moved into Number 10," it said.

Therefore, according to the Spanish newspaper: "[The News of the World's] closure is a turning point in the history of British journalism, and in politics."

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Hands off

25 June 2011 Last updated at 23:46 GMT By Manuela Saragosa Business reporter, BBC News, Athens Businesses say that the government, headed by Prime Minister George Papandreou, has put its interests before the country's The Greeks call it "Rousfeti". It means expensive political favours and cronyism.

For Nikos Sofianos, head of the Greek wood flooring company Shelman Sofianos, it's a word that sums up everything that has gone wrong with the country's economy.

He blames Greece's bloated public sector, the country's ballooning debt and the government's inability to deliver on many of the crucial economic reforms being demanded by international authorities, on a culture of "Rousfeti".

It means, he says, that political and personal interests prevail over economic necessity.

It is a point of view shared by Constantine Michalos, president of the Athens Chamber of Commerce: "The horrific example I always bring is that cleaners in the Ministry of Finance earn as much as managers in other ministries," he says.

Competing political interests inside government have made it difficult for the private sector to flourish.

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If you want to invest 5 or 10 million euros and this country does not support you and faces you like an enemy... then people are fed up and they leave”

End Quote Nikos Sofianos Head of flooring company Shelman Sofianos That matters because if Greece is to pay back its international debt and not pitch Europe's banking system and the rest of the eurozone into crisis, the economy here needs to grow and generate enough revenues for state coffers.

"You can't keep milking a cow without feeding it," Mr Michalos says.

"If you don't stimulate the economy then you'll stagnate it completely and then there's only one way to go: Default."

Lost investment

Last year the government introduced a so-called fast-track policy for the private sector, which was supposed to encourage businesses like Nikos Sofianos' to flourish.

"Nothing has been done. I haven't seen even one foreign investment," he says. "It has not been implemented."

"I give you an example of a friend from Taiwan who operates in Romania and wanted to set up a factory here in Greece three years ago, for recycling plastic materials," Mr Sofianos continues.

"He was trying for one and a half years. He was going from ministry to ministry.

"So the Ministry of Economics was asking one thing, but the Ministry of Environment didn't accept what the other ministry was asking."

In the end, his Taiwanese friend gave up.

"If you want to invest 5 or 10 million euros and you come in and this country does not support you at all and faces you like an enemy... then people are fed up and they leave."

"As a society, we do not realise that these investments will give places of employment," Mr Sofianos says.

Plans halted Austerity cuts and job losses are also hitting businesses hard as consumers have to cut back

George Peristeris, chief executive of Gek Terna, a large Greek energy company, has also been stymied by government bureaucracy.

Last year, encouraged by Prime Minister George Papandreou's plan to transform the country into a green economy harnessing its abundance of sun and wind, he tried to set up an offshore wind project in the Aegean Sea.

His project - along with several other similar ones put forward by other energy companies - came to an abrupt halt when the government decided large-scale renewable energy projects should be managed by the state and not the private sector.

A year later he's still not clear why the government made a u-turn, but he qualifies his criticism: "In the energy sector it's not easy to set up a business anywhere. That's not just Greece, but also in France or Spain."

Empty tills Continue reading the main story

You have to save some money for a future that does not look very promising”

End Quote Dimitris Dimiroulis University professor Even for businesses that do have the necessary papers, getting financing in the midst of the country's economic crisis is becoming ever more difficult.

"Proposals by healthy companies are not accepted by banks at the moment simply because there is no money in their tills," says Mr Michalos of the Athens Chamber of Commerce.

Banks, he says, are being coerced by the government into buying national bonds to support the economy. "There is a limit to these actions," he says.

"Everyone has to realise that if the business sector does not survive, then the rest of the economy won't survive."

In the meantime, Nikos Sofianos' flooring business is down some 70% from last year in terms of revenues.

With salaries, pensions and perks being cut in the public sector - which accounts for about a fifth of the total workforce - and a struggling economy overall, people don't have money to spend on things like a new wood floor.

Take Dimitris Dimiroulis. His salary at the Panteion University in Athens has been cut by about 20% in the past year, and he fears it may go down by 40% in the year ahead.

"You have to be very, very careful in your expenses," he says. "And you have to save some money for a future that does not look very promising."

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