OnlineDomain.com Domain Name News & Opinions
The municipality of Samos, a Greek island in the Aegean sea, paid 3,159 Euro for a 5-minute job assignment. The price included Greek 24% VAT tax.
Specifically they paid Andreas Skalkos (e-samos) to forward 3 domain names (vathi.gr, vathi.org, samos.gov.gr) to the domain name islandofsamos.gr.
The contract was published on the Greek government website that is dedicated to provide publicity to all government contracts: diavgeia.gov.gr.
The job was to login into the control panel of the hosting provider and point the 3 domain names to the main website. That is maybe 5 minutes of work.
I will add 3 minutes if the poor worker had to also change the nameservers of the 3 domains at the registrar.
This complicated work has not yet been completed although it was assigned on the 9th of June. Probably Andreas Skalkos is busy with other similar time consuming work.
I guess his next job is to forward the domain name samos.gr (that is also owned by the municipality of Samos) to the islandofsamos.gr website. Samos.gr is not resolving.
This is what is wrong with Greece all these years. State officials wasting the money of Greek people paying their friends and family.
Taking advantage of the lack of IT proficiency of govt end users.
Or this is a tailor-made contract for a ‘friend’ of the municipality.
The latter…
“This is what is wrong with Greece all these years. State officials wasting the money of Greek people paying their friends and family.”
It’s not just Greece, we have this problem in the USA as well. Let’s not forget the Obamacare website that cost between $800 million to $5 Billion depending on who you ask. In the USA we have a Presidential candidate that has addressed and focused much attention to ending “GOVERNMENT WASTE” (hence his popularity)…:)
A LOT of public money wasted … same as in Italy … but I guess here is worse … 🙂
Just think that the Rome municipality spends over 5 mln EUR per year for the water of its public fountains (billed by ACEA, the local water & energy company), of which 600,000 EUR only for the Piazza Navona fountain, while the actual water consumption in this case is for only 4,757 EUR …
And the Vatican is another big black hole in terms on money wasted …
It looks like one of those cases where the municipality owed the contractor money from some other project and they decided to pay it from another budget. This happens more often than not, but in this case they could probably take better care of the description so that all this negative publicity wouldn’t have to happen.
Why not put the correct project instead of this ridiculous project?
Because they probably couldn’t. It goes like this: They do a project and they exhaust the budget. Since those are usually financed by the state or the EU, they can’t justify more money for it. Then they remember to ask the contractor for some more things promising they will pay from the budget of another project. They probably did something like that, only completely wrong of course.
Another scenario is that they might have projects A and B, A’s budget being small and B’s budget being bigger than needed. They can’t change the budgets, so they agree that they’ll pay the contractor a larger amount for project A, covering the difference from the excess amount that is not used from project B. Again, with a ridiculous description, which is what made it surface.
Sorry but this is no excuse.
Project B can not be x100 more than it should be.
And project B should have been approved, they should have made it public so other companies could bid on it and so on.
I think you are analyzing a lot more than you should. This is simply a friendly pay off.
It looks like I’m not over-analyzing. There was an official press release that said just that: This amount was money owed to the contractor, and they were given from this new budget. There is no “project” involved for companies to bid – it was just another budget. This is of course marginally legal, to say the least, but it’s the official statement the mayor gave. And they admitted that the description was bullshit.
http://www.neasamos.gr/?p=15404
They can say whatever they want. I don’t have to believe them.
Actually it doesn’t say what you claim it says.
There is no “new budget” as the new budget would be 10 euro. This is not marginally legal, it is plain illegal.
They will simply create a new invoice with a different “correct” service that was done or not.
Now no one believes that this guy did any work in the past few years.
The whole EU is one big waste created by leftist politicians for their own benefit.
I hope UK will vote to leave this sick organization and it will be the end of this experiment