A Tale of Greek Enterprise and Olive Oil, Smothered in Red Tape
Angelos Tzortzinis for The New York Times
Fotis Antonopoulos’s struggles to start OliveShop.com have made him a reluctant emblem of thwarted Greek entrepreneurship.
By SUZANNE DALEY
Published: March 18, 2012
ATHENS — It was about a year ago that Fotis I. Antonopoulos, a successful Web program designer here, decided he wanted to open an e-business selling olive products.
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Luckily, he already had a day job.
It took him 10 months — crisscrossing the city to collect dozens of forms and stamps of approval, including proof that he was up to date on his pension contributions — before he could get started. But even that was not enough. In perhaps the strangest twist of all, his board members were required by the Health Department to submit lung X-rays — and stool samples — since this was a food company.
“I laugh about it now,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be so funny if I didn’t have a very good job with very good pay. It would have been an absolute nightmare.”
With Greece’s economy entering its fourth year of recession, its entrepreneurs are eager to reverse a frightening tide. Last year, at least 68,000 small and medium-size businesses closed in Greece; nearly 135,000 jobs associated with them vanished. Predictions for 2012 are also bleak.
But despite the government’s repeated promises to improve things, the climate for doing business here remains abysmal. In a recent report titled “Greece 10 Years Ahead,” McKinsey & Company described Greece’s economy as “chronically suffering from unfavorable conditions for business.” Start-ups faced immense amounts of red tape, complex administrative and tax systems and procedural disincentives, it said.
The tale of what it took to launch Mr. Antonopoulos’s OliveShop.com Web site has turned him into something of a celebrity these days, though a reluctant one.
He had hoped his experience — which he first described in a podcast between friends — would encourage other young Greeks to set up their own Web businesses.
Instead, his story has grabbed headlines here as a glaring reminder of how far Greece has to go to become a country that encourages new business ventures.
“I know that what happened to us is not in isolation,” he said. “This is what everyone else who tries to start a business is living. It is very frustrating.”
E-commerce is still relatively new in Greece, though growing. But Internet businesses with international sales are so rare that when Mr. Antonopoulos sought help with processing payments, three different Greek banks seemed incapable of grasping the concept.
Before the banks would agree to act as clearinghouses for credit cards, they insisted that portions of the Olive Shop Web site — including the company’s marketing and privacy policies — be written exclusively in Greek, even though Mr. Antonopoulos tried to explain that his customers would not understand Greek.
“We kept trying to tell them that the idea was to export — that customers might be Chinese, and they wouldn’t understand,” he said, throwing up his hands. “It was useless.”
In the end, he turned to PayPal and had what he needed to get started in less than 10 minutes, he said.
None of this is news to Vassilis Korkidis, the president of the National Confederation of Hellenic Commerce, a trade association in Athens. “You could tell me anything, and I would believe it,” Mr. Korkidis said. “I have seen it all.”
Part of Mr. Antonopoulos’s problem, Mr. Korkidis ventured, was his unwillingness to pay what is routinely referred to here as the “speed tax” — bribes to move things along.
Nor is Mr. Korkidis much of a fan of recent government efforts to improve things. He pointed to a pamphlet produced by the Ministry of Development, which explained a new “one-stop shop” program for new businesses.
“This doesn’t work,” he said. “You have to collect 10 papers first — and then it is one-stop shopping. Ridiculous.”
At 36, Mr. Antonopoulos is an aging computer whiz kid with long hair and an easy smile. He is the head of digital innovation at Atcom S.A., a company that makes software to manage content, advertising and search-engine results on Web sites and mobile devices. He believes that technology and the Internet can be “a gateway from misery to success” for Greece.
He hoped that OliveShop.com would provide a case study, showing young Greeks, particularly those comfortable with computers, that they did not have to leave the country to find work.
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