Archive note: This text comes from the old archive of Nomika Epilekta and is preserved with care for historical and informational reading.

On 20.03.2013, the new law on drugs (Law 4139/2013) was published in the Government Gazette under the title “law on addictive substances and other provisions”. This note will not offer criticism, positive or negative, of the new law concerning drugs, drug addicts, their criminal treatment, the State’s hypocritical care for their “treatment”, drug traffickers or dealers and the draconian penalties with which judicial power is equipped in order to make its force felt, and not in order to reform the sick and the drug traffickers through the extreme penalties provided. Our purpose is to focus attention on one of the law’s “other provisions” and, more specifically, on article 68, by which article 235 of the Penal Code is replaced, under the title “passive bribery”. The first paragraph punishes the public employee who, in breach of his duties, asks for or receives, directly or through the mediation of a third person, for himself or for a third person, benefits, that is, “gifts” and “small gifts” of any kind, or accepts a promise of them, for an act or omission of his, future or already completed, that relates to his duties or is contrary to them. The penalties provided in these cases are · (a) imprisonment of at least one year and up to five years, and · (b) the simultaneous imposition of a monetary penalty “equal to fifty times the benefit and up to the amount of one hundred and fifty thousand (250,000) euros”, and, · (c) if the benefit of the bribed public employee “cannot be valued in money, the monetary penalty cannot be less than ten thousand (10,000) nor more than one hundred and fifty thousand (150,000) euros”. In the second paragraph of article 68 of Law 4139/2013, we read: “If the value of the benefits exceeds the amount of one hundred and twenty thousand (120,000) euros or if the perpetrator has the status of an employee of the Ministry of Finance, imprisonment in a penitentiary, that is, a sentence starting from five years, up to ten (10) years is imposed, as well as a mandatory monetary penalty, which cannot be less than fifty thousand (50,000) euros nor more than five hundred thousand (500,000) euros”. These provisions were enacted because of the generalized phenomenon, for countless years, of shameless bribery and the corresponding taking of bribes by almost the entire body of tax-office employees or D.O.Y. employees (Public Financial Services), and generally by employees of the Ministry of Finance, and because of the corresponding very serious social problem of corruption and decay. Of course, if you ask the trade unionists of the bribed employees, they will answer that these are “isolated behaviors” of a few bad employees. The same thing was chewed over, on every occasion, by all politicians. Yet the need to enact these severe penalties confirms the opposite: honest employees are very few and are the exception, while the overwhelming majority of employees of the Ministry of Finance compete with other colleagues of theirs, such as urban-planning office employees. But we have not yet reached the third paragraph of article 68 of Law 4139/2013, about the existence of which a Greek living abroad asked me, unable to believe that such a provision exists, by which, as he emphasized to me, the improper transaction between doctor and patient is “legalized”, or, in other words, the “envelope” is established legislatively and becomes in substance mandatory. It is this envelope because of which we have been disgraced to the ends of the earth, with relevant mocking publications, such as in the German magazine “DerSpiegel” and also in other European, and not only European, publications. The third paragraph of the above article therefore provides that, pay attention, “a simple material provision as an expression of gratitude does not constitute bribery”. That is, if not only the doctor who longs for the envelope, but also any public employee, demands a monetary consideration for services that he is obliged to provide and for which he is paid a salary, the demand for and receipt of the monetary consideration or “material provision”, within whose meaning anything one can imagine falls, does not constitute bribery or the taking of a bribe. It constitutes an “expression of gratitude”. For example, if the employee responsible for approving a large investment accelerates the bureaucratic procedures, the investor, who was not forced to wait several years in order to obtain stamped, useless documents before being able to put the investment into practice, has the right under the law to make a “simple material provision”, even of several hundred thousand euros, which the employee is absolutely lawfully entitled to collect, without being bribed, when he can prove that it was an “expression of gratitude”. You can imagine endless such cases in which bribery will be justified as an “expression of gratitude”. Conclusion: By the third paragraph of article 68 of Law 4139/2013, article 235 of the Penal Code, which punishes so-called passive bribery, is abolished, because the bribed public employee will always be able to claim that what he collected or acquired was nothing other than a “simple material provision as an expression of gratitude”. A gratitude from the corrupt toward the drafters of this paragraph and toward those who voted for the law, which was the result of profound and democratic consultation. Could it perhaps be an understanding among the corrupt? I do not believe it…