Lawyers protest rally: "We don’t ask whether we will win or lose – we fight"

In the words of the poet, President of the Plenum of Heads of Greek Bar Associations Dimitris Vervesos concluded his moving speech at a rally of lawyers protesting the tax bill, organized by the Coordination Committee of Self-Employed Professionals – Scientists, Craftsmen, Tradesmen.

Speaking at the rally, the chairman of the plenum of presidents of Greek bar associations, Dimitris Vervesos, said:

“Today we have gathered here in larger numbers, more dynamically, more en masse, so that the authorities can hear our opinion, the voice of our struggle and suffering:

• To those who point a finger at us and tell us to change our profession.
• To those who have never worked a day in their lives and are supported by government benefits and our taxes.
• For those who have not felt the torment of a freelancer, will he earn a month, will he go to work, how will he and his family live.
• To those who once called us honest, but now claim that we are collectively evading taxes.
• To those who tried to crush our dignity.
• Those who wander in their political flesh from government to government in search of a position in the cabinet.
• To the boys in the party crowd who never sweated for a paycheck, only in gyms and on the beaches.
• “To those who, on the one hand, say that imputed income is compromising, and anyone can ask for an audit, as if an audit is an invitation to a wedding, and on the other hand, declare that first we will pay based on the presumption of guilt , and then, years later, the audit will come, plunging us into tax bureaucracy.
• To those who think the 13,000 lawyers who declare their home as their place of business are tax evaders because they don’t have to pay rent and utilities.
• To those who consider 1/3 of freelancers who work under the 120 installment plan with EFKA and DOY to be tax evaders
• To those who give away all forms of power and redistribute wealth to the benefit of the few and at the expense of the many.
• For those who, while discriminating against the middle class in taxes, the same law halves the tax on capital concentration.
• To those who, during the pre-election period, promised us other things, promoting the Katrougalos law, and now suddenly envied his achievements and is unleashing a new, more severe tax storm on us, at the expense of many more people than him.
• Those who abused our trust to get onto parliamentary benches and ministerial offices.

We call them, we call them to the street:

• They won’t get rid of us easily because we are long distance runners.
• They will not kick us out of our offices, shops and our workplaces, but we will kick them out of parliament and their ministries, as we did with their predecessors.
• We take our time in the face of propaganda from opportunistic congressmen and media that are out to beat us and misinform the people. Their denigration and attacks on us undermine us and make us even more stubborn.
• They will find us in front of them and against them, in the streets, in social struggles, in our workplaces, places of work and life, in the courts, as in 2019 in ΚΑΛΠΕΣ, they will find us EVERYWHERE.
• Let our dreams become their nightmares.
• Let our struggle for survival and dignity become a stumbling block to their arrogance and authoritarianism.
• Our struggle is an obstacle to their plans.
• Our visions and hopes have soul. They are not put up for auction, not a single game has been played yet, but our country has never bowed to any game.

And as the poet said:

“We will continue to say freedom – freedom, guilt – guilt, with the stubbornness of a madman who writes his name on the wall with his nails.

We don’t ask whether we will win or lose.

We are fighting.”

On Friday, December 8, a plenum of presidents of Greek bar associations will meet in Athens to once again assess the situation and decide what the next steps in the lawyers’ struggle will be.

As previously reported by Athens News, the government has submitted a bill to parliament on the taxation of self-employed professionals.

The main point of this law was the use of imputed income, based on the “presumption of guilt.” The bill provides for the establishment of a minimum annual imputed income of 10,920 euros (calculated as 780 euros of the minimum wage for 14 months) for all self-employed people, even in those years when they record losses. The change will result in an additional tax burden of more than €500, depending on a self-employed person’s income, and more than 6 in 10 professionals will pay increased tax, averaging €1,444 each, not including the unaffordable insurance premiums they pay monthly.

Read more about the bill in the publication Tax for self-employed – 5 categories.

Our subscribers can read a more complete version at link.

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