Greek pensioners queue at dawn as banks allow a €120 withdrawal
- By: Jon Henley | The Guardian
- Jul 2, 2015
- 3 min read
Banks across Greece opened on Wednesday to allow pensioners without debit cards limited access to their funds
Greek pensioners began queuing before dawn at up to 1,000 banks around the country which opened on Wednesday to let them collect the €120 (£85) they will be allowed this week.
Hours after Greece’s bailout programme with its creditors expired and the country became the first in the developed world to miss an IMF loan repayment, Greek pensioners without debit cards were at last able to withdraw some cash.
“It’s not too soon – I was starting to get extremely concerned,” said Vassilis Argitis, 69, who worked for 35 years at American Express, outside the National Bank branch on Perikleous Street in central Athens.
“Now at least I have these €120, for one week. It should be enough, I hope. But the situation is very worrying. It’s very upsetting.”
Banks are due to remain closed all week after the Greek government imposed capital controls following the decision by the prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, to call a referendum on Sunday on whether to accept the demands that lenders insist must be met before they will release fresh bailout funds to stop a Greek default.
Long queues formed through the night on Sunday as anxious Greeks withdrew their cash. ATMs had been replenished and reopened by Monday afternoon, but Greek account holders are now limited to withdrawals of €60 a day (in practice, many are finding it hard to take out more than €50 because of a growing shortage of €20 notes).
Large numbers of pensioners, however, do not use bank cards and rely instead on deposit books – so have been unable to withdraw any money at all. Many were further frustrated by a string of finance ministry announcements, each reducing the amount they would be allowed to take out.
On Sunday, the ministry said pensioners would be able to access their whole benefit; on Monday the maximum was capped at €240, and by Tuesday it had become €120. To make matters worse, not all pension funds had transferred the cash to retirees’ bank accounts.
And there was yet more confusion when some banks decided overnight to serve pensioners in strict alphabetical order, with only surnames from A to I being catered for on Wednesday and the remainder told to return on Thursday or Friday.
“The whole thing has been chaotic,” said Sofia Lagiou, 65, a retired police officer. “This money, now, is better than nothing. But people like us don’t need any more adventures in our lives. The government must go back and negotiate immediately. People cannot live like this.”
Her friend Irene Fragoulia, 71, a former customs officer, said Tsipras was “gambling with the country’s future. Does he really want Greece to be like Albania used to be, like a developing country, in Africa? Because that’s what will happen if we end up out of Europe.”
Tsipras and his supporters “say they want to restore our pride and dignity”, said Eleni Panagakos, 72, a retired schoolteacher. “But is this dignity? Queuing up to get a fraction of your pension? It doesn’t look like it.”
Argitis, who said his monthly pension had fallen from €1,800 at the start of the crisis to €1,300 now, blamed “the previous governments, all of them: Tsipras is clean, I think, he’s a good boy. He’s standing up to the Eurogroup, at least. But he took over a big mess, and we are in a bad situation now, for sure. I really don’t know what will happen. It could get very bad.”
Some banks were handing out debit cards to pensioners in the hope they use them in future. “I can try, I suppose,” said Yannis Stathopoulos, 79, who used to work for the Athens public transport authority. “But I never did before. It looks confusing to start now.”
Stathopoulos said young people should think twice before encouraging the government to take Greece out of the euro and return to the drachma. “The drachma was terrible for us here in the 1950s, I remember very well,” he said. “People don’t realise. Everything would change. Everything.”
Source: Theguardian.com
By: Jon Henley
