Misunderstanding allows biggest corruption round-up of century

It all started quite innocently: a website advising US tourists travelling abroad indicated to young people wishing to date that the Greek equivalent of “Do you want to go up for a coffee and more” was the expression “Do you want fakelaki?”.

This information made it into the briefing packs distributed to all the participants of a Seminar organised by the US Security Exchange Commission (SEC) around the theme “Corruption in the developing world: Threats, Tools & Sanctions”, an event that brought together financial regulators from across the world in a centrally-located hotel of Athens, Greece.

When the US delegates decided to hit the town after a day of meetings, quite a few of the single participants met lovely local ladies in a hot night club at the outskirts of Athens and after consuming a few glasses and testing each other’s skills on the dance floor, decided to go for the pick-up line “Do you want fakelaki?”.

To their great surprise, the women all readily agreed and asked who the “fakelaki” should be given to. The delegation then discovered little by little that Fakelaki is the Greek for “little envelopes,” the bribes that affect everyone in Greece, and that the ladies thought that the delegates were bankers trying to buy some favours from Greek decision-makers, with them acting as intermediaries.

The SEC officials informed the local authorities who were able to round-up quite a few “fakelaki” amateurs. The head of the delegation told the BJ that “whilst it was regrettable that such an error had slipped into the briefing pack, the outcome was actually positive and that the organisers would thus not pursue any action against the website at the origin of the mistake”. The webmaster in charge of the concerned website admitted to using Google translate quite often, but thought that in this case, the mistake could come from a disgruntled trainee with a nasty sense of humour.