March 29, 2024

Greece Selects a Prime Minister After Days of Wrangling

The choice of Mr. Papademos, a former vice president of the European Central Bank, came after four days of tense negotiations that put Greece’s feuding political parties on full display.

A written statement issued by the office of President Karolos Papoulias was read on television in midafternoon confirming Mr. Papademos’s appointment and adding that the “chief role of the new interim administration will be the implementation of the decisions of the European Union summit of October 26 and the policies that are connected to this.”

Mr. Papademos appeared briefly shortly after the announcement. He said Greece still faced dire problems. But he struck an optimist note.

“The course will not be easy,” he said. “But the problems, I’m convinced, will be solved. They will be solved faster, with a smaller cost and in an efficient way, if there is unity, agreement and prudence.”

After months of domestic protests and building pressure from the European Union, Prime Minister George Papandreou agreed on Sunday to step down once a new coalition government had been formed. But the talks dragged on, apparently hostage to political maneuvering by all sides.

Mr. Papademos, however, is seen as outside the old-boy networks of Greek politics — a technocrat, perhaps able to take Greece on a new path.

News reports earlier this week said that Mr. Papademos was insisting on several measures he believed were crucial to his success, including a minimum of at least six months at the helm. Earlier, Greece’s major political parties had agreed to new elections in just 100 days.

The reports also said that he insisted that members of the opposition New Democratic party play a significant role in the unity government, which will have to impose additional austerity measures almost immediately.

The opposition, headed by Antonis Samaras, had resisted, not wanting to be linked to deeply unpopular reforms.

It was not clear immediately whether Mr. Papademos’s demands had been met.

He faces a difficult task. He will have to move swiftly to reassure the country’s major foreign lenders — the so called troika comprising the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund — who were shocked when Mr. Papandreou decided without warning to submit the latest bailout package to a referendum, a move that eventually led to his demise.

Mr. Papademos must also persuade the Greek Parliament to pass the new austerity measures, which include more layoffs of government workers, in a climate of growing social unrest.

Mr. Papandreou went on national television on Wednesday evening to announce that a new interim government had been formed.

But he did not name his successor, and in the hours that followed, it became clear that  political confusion had set in once more. Television provided glimpses of some of the drama. A furious Giorgos Karatzaferis, the leader of the small far-right party Laos, stormed out the presidential office building shortly after Mr. Papandreou’s speech. He told waiting reporters that he had been summoned to a meeting with Mr. Papandreou; the president; and Mr. Samaras, but found himself sitting in a hall alone. Apparently, the other men were too busy arguing to meet with him.

Mr. Karatzaferis, one of the few politicians willing to risk the potential damage from supporting a new power-sharing government that must take on a host of unpopular tasks, said political games were being played. “This is unacceptable,” he huffed before leaving.

Some Pasok members appeared to push publicly on Wednesday for Mr. Papademos, a respected economist and former  vice president of the European Central Bank who is seen as being a dynamic and technically able choice.

But his strength made him a potential rival for those who have aspirations in the next elections, analysts said. In addition, Mr. Papademos had set several conditions for taking the job, including a six-month term and the ability to choose his own finance minister, which had troubled some members of both parties. In fact, Mr. Papademos was acting to remove one of the most powerful members of Pasok, the current finance minister, Evangelos Venizelos, who is likely to run for prime minister in the next elections.

Nonetheless, many of the younger politicians are eager for someone who will make quick progress in getting the country’s financial house in order. One prominent member of Pasok, Anna Diamantopoulou, the minister of education, issued a letter on Wednesday that was widely interpreted as public support for Mr. Papademos, the economist.

“The country needs a prime minister of high status and acceptance, both inside and out of the country, with deep knowledge of financial affairs,” she wrote.

Mr. Papandreou’s televised address served as a kind of valedictory speech, summing up moves in recent years to stabilize and help the country, expressing the country’s continued commitment to the European bailout plan and urging political parties to transcend their differences.

Ahead of the meeting with the Mr. Papoulias, Mr. Papandreou said the country’s new government would signal the “beginning of a new political mentality, a new political culture.”

“Today, we leave aside our differences,” he said, heralding “a common effort to ensure the country moves forward, not only to remain part of the euro zone but also to emerge from the crisis.”

He said the interim government would make the necessary efforts to “justify the sacrifices made by the Greek people over the past two years,” referring to a raft of wage and pension cuts as well as hefty tax increases. The chief goals would be to secure crucial rescue financing for the country and continue talks with foreign creditors, he said.

Some interpreted the tone of his speech as signaling his departure not only from Greek politics but also from the country itself.

“I never put my position above the national good,” he said. “For me, Greece is above everything. Wherever I go, I will carry the Greek flag in my heart.” He added that he would do everything he could to support the new prime minister and the new government.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/11/world/europe/greek-leaders-resume-talks-on-interim-government.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

DealBook: In a Bill, Wall Street Shows Its Clout

Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York.Manuel Balce Ceneta/Associated PressSenator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

Wall Street often tries to play down its influence in Washington. As Congress pushed through financial regulations that seemed to get watered down last year, Wall Street’s chief executives tried to suggest, somewhat surprisingly, that their highly paid lobbyists did not have much sway.

If there is still any question about how much power Wall Street actually has in Washington, here is some fresh evidence worth examining.

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In a piece of legislation recently passed by the House and the Senate to revamp patent law, a tiny provision was inserted at the last minute called Section 18.

The provision, which my colleague Edward Wyatt detailed in an article ahead of the House’s vote on the bill last month, has only one purpose: to allow the banking industry to skirt paying for certain important patents involving “business methods.”

The provision even allows “retroactive reviews of approved business method patents, allowing the financial services industry to challenge patents that have already been found valid both at the U.S. Patent and Trade Office and in Federal Court,” according to Representative Aaron Schock, an Illinois Republican who tried to strike the provision.

The legislation was initially introduced by Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, with an even narrower view: to protect the interests of his big bank constituents in a dispute with DataTreasury Corporation of Plano, Tex., a company that owns dozens of patents for processing digital copies of checks.

Wall Street fought for the bill because it says it has been held hostage by holders of “business method” patents that should never have been granted by the patent office in the first place. Banks like JPMorgan Chase have been fighting DataTreasury over its patents for years.

The language in the bill is expansive. It covers patents for “a financial product or service” as well as “corresponding apparatus for performing data processing or other operations used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service.”

But since the bill and Section 18 were passed and word has spread about it, dozens of other companies are starting to worry that the breadth of the provision may affect them too. And they are fighting back, hoping that the Senate — which still has to reconcile the House’s bill with its own — tosses the provision out.

“It would be a tragedy if the greed of the big banks and their willing accomplices in Congress use this important legislation to trample the rights of legitimate patent holders and in the process weaken the integrity of our patent system,” Tom Giovanetti, the president of the Institute for Policy Innovation, a conservative research group, said in a statement.

Steven F. Borsand, executive vice president for intellectual property at Trading Technologies International, which develops high-performance trading software for derivatives professionals, is worried that Section 18 will allow many of his banking clients to simply copy his company’s software.

“This isn’t just about DataTreasury,” he said. “Section 18 will affect many companies, including ours.” He expects that his company will be forced to “spend more time and money defending” its patents, he said in a statement, adding, “Only lawyers stand to benefit from this.”

Other companies, including high-tech firms like VeriFone and Square, the mobile phone payment start-up, could be affected by the law, putting their patents in jeopardy. Cantor Fitzgerald, known for its computer-based bond brokerage, has a number of valuable patents that could similarly fall under the legislation.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, a new patent law may seem to be unimportant or to affect only a few inventors.

But Section 18 represents a much larger issue: It is perhaps the most blatant demonstration of the lobbying power of Wall Street and, just as important, the willingness of Congress to support the interests of the banks, even in the face of clear evidence that the law has no purpose other than to benefit the financial services industry.

When anyone suggests that Wall Street owns Congress — whether true or not — Section 18 will be Example A of a pork-barrel project for Wall Street. For lack of a better cliché, it might even be considered another backdoor bailout of the banks.

The banks “are attempting to write into law what they have been unable to achieve in litigation,” Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, wrote in a letter to colleagues.

Mr. Schumer has said he is simply defending New York banks against a company that has made a “cottage industry out of extracting legal settlements” from a dubious patent provision.

Admittedly, it seems somewhat preposterous that simply processing scanned checks, as DataTreasury does, could be a patentable business method. But we have courts, which have upheld these patents, for a reason.

Perhaps it would be acceptable if the law was about a specific patent, but experts like F. Scott Kieff, a professor at George Washington University Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, worry that the law is too broad. “The scope is enormous and almost any method patent can qualify,” he wrote in a Hoover Institution journal.

He is worried about the law’s impact not just on investors in the United States, but also about even broader implications. “When word gets out that intellectual property rights are not being taken seriously in the U.S., especially for any class of patents that can be a convenient political target of powerful, well-heeled interest groups like banks, our voracious international competitors will pounce,” he said.

He may or may not be right about that. But if the legislation does become law, it will be another reason the “powerful, well-heeled” will appear to have bought Congress again.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=8e6ef95c9381cfa003aa8dfd84eef778