Boomerang_ Travels in the New Third World - Michael D. Lewis [32]
Not long after Doukas began his new job, two monks showed up unannounced in his Finance Ministry office. One was Father Ephraim, of whom Doukas had heard; the other, unknown to Doukas but clearly the sharp end of the operation, a fellow named Father Arsenios. They owned this lake, they said, and they wanted the Ministry of Finance to pay them cash for it. “Someone had given them full title to the lake,” says Doukas. “What they wanted now was to monetize it. They came to me and said, ‘Can you buy us out?’” Before the meeting, Doukas sensed, they had done a great deal of homework. “Before they come to you they know a lot about you—your wife, your parents, the extent of your religious beliefs,” he said. “The first thing they asked me was if I wanted them to take my confession.” Doukas decided that it would be unwise to tell the monks his secrets. Instead he told them he would not give them money for their lake—which he still didn’t see how exactly they had come to own. “They seemed to think I had all this money to spend,” says Doukas. “I said, ‘Listen, contrary to popular opinion, there is no money in the Finance Ministry.’ And they said, ‘Okay, if you cannot buy us out, why can’t you give us some of your pieces of land?’”
This turned out to be the winning strategy: exchanging the lake, which generated no rents, for government-owned properties that did. Somehow the monks convinced government officials that the land around the lake was worth far more than the 55 million euros an independent appraiser later assessed its value as, and then used that higher valuation to ask for 1 billion euros’ worth of government property. Doukas declined to give them any of the roughly 250 billion euros’ worth controlled by the Ministry of Finance. (“No fucking way I’m doing that,” he says he told them.) The monks went to the source of the next most valuable land—farmlands and forests controlled by the Ministry of Agriculture. Doukas recalls, “I get a call from the minister of agriculture saying, ‘We’re trading them all this land, but it’s not enough. Why don’t you throw in some of your pieces of land, too?’” After Doukas declined, he received another call—this one from the prime minister’s office. Still he said no. Next he receives this piece of paper saying he’s giving the monks government land, and all he needs to do is sign it. “I said, ‘Fuck you, I’m not signing it.’”
And he didn’t—at least not in its original form. But the prime minister’s office pressed him; the monks, it seemed to Doukas, had some kind of hold on the prime minister’s chief of staff. That fellow, Giannis Angelou, had come to know the monks a few years before, just after he had been diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. The monks prayed for him; he didn’t die, but instead made a miraculous recovery. He had, however, given them his confession.
By now Doukas thought of these monks less as simple con men than as the savviest businessmen he had ever dealt with. “I told them they should be running the Ministry of Finance,” he says. “They didn’t disagree.” In the end, under pressure from his boss, Doukas signed two pieces of paper. The first agreed not to challenge the monks’ ownership of the lake; the second made possible the land exchange. It did not give the monks rights to any lands from the Finance Ministry, but, by agreeing to accept their lake into the Ministry of Finance’s real estate portfolio, Doukas enabled their deal with the minister of agriculture. In exchange for their lake the monks received seventy-three different government properties, including what had formerly been the gymnastics center for the 2004 Olympics—which, like much of what the