In Brief
Cash registers
Kiosk owners, market traders must issue receipts by July 1 Kiosk owners and street-market traders must be working with cash registers, and issuing receipts, by July 1, according to an Finance Ministry decision made public yesterday. Taxi drivers have also been asked to use cash registers, issue receipts and keep account books as part of the government’s drive to crack down on tax evasion. Cabbies have expressed reluctance to issue receipts and be taxed according to their income, as they have enjoyed a special tax status to date. Market traders have also expressed opposition. However, most kiosk owners are reportedly ready to install registers as long as the government lifts restrictions barring them from selling products such as lottery tickets. Fraudster thwarted Worker staged own mugging A 35-year-old employee of a courier firm in Thessaloniki was charged with fraudulently claiming to have been mugged and cheating his firm out of 5,000 euros. According to police, the 35-year-old visited his local police station last week claiming to have been attacked in the street by two assailants who forced him to hand over 5,000 euros in cash along with credit cards and checks issued by his company. During questioning, police saw inconsistencies in the man’s account of events. Eventually, the 35-year-old admitted to having staged the mugging in order to raise enough cash to replace nearly 15,000 euros he had embezzled from his firm’s coffers. Burned corpse A coroner in Hania, Crete, yesterday was seeking to determine the cause of death of a man whose charred corpse was found in a wooded area near the northern port late on Wednesday. The victim is believed to be a Pakistani immigrant who had been reported missing to police on Monday by his brother. Street killing An 18-year-old youth found dead in the street in the Thessaloniki suburb of Toumba late on Wednesday was probably the victim of muggers, police said yesterday. According to witnesses, the young man was set upon by a group of three men who beat him before searching his pockets and fleeing with his wallet. Onlookers called an ambulance which transferred the 18-year-old to a nearby hospital but doctors pronounced him dead on arrival. Drug haul Port Authority officials in the northwestern port of Igoumenitsa said yesterday that they had detained two foreign nationals, aged 46 and 20, after a search on their car, in which they had been waiting to board a ferry to Italy, turned up 6 kilograms of opium and nearly 6 kilograms of another drug that police did not identify. Authorities grew suspicious after an inspection of their passports revealed that they had arrived in Greece following trips to Iran, Turkey and Egypt. The authorities’ specially trained dogs subsequently sniffed out the drugs.
