Greek crisis: social enterprise is one answer to economic strife

A sustainable project to recycle forest biomass for heating is among new ideas that can turn community interest into profit

Forest fires, common in Greece, would be reduced by a scheme to recycle biomass as well as providing fuel for homes. Photograph: Thanassis Stavrakis/AP

Good ideas? Greece, when you look, really isn't short of them, and people are starting to do something about them.

Ioannis Lagos is an avuncular fiftysomething accountant from the small mountain village of Stemnitsa in the Arcadia region. The village, like many of those in the region, is surrounded by forest. The forest, as forests do in Greece, catch fire, and have done a lot in recent summers.

The main reason the fires spread so fast is the quantity of fallen trees, branches and brushwood on the forest floor.

At the same time, Lagos and some of his friends, volunteer firefighters from Mainalo mountain, have worked out that it now costs roughly €3,500 a year to keep the average Arcadian household warm with heating oil, which is set to hit €1.40 a litre this winter.

Suppose you collected all that forest floor biomass from the 40,000 acres of forest belonging to the commune, turned it into wood pellets – less than half the price of heating oil for the same output – and sold them to local people at slightly less than the average market price? You would be easing the forest fire problem, helping citizens of Arcadia to heat their homes more cheaply (the wood-burning stove they would need would pay for itself within a year) – and you could even pay the salaries of the local unemployed people who did the work.

I won't go into the detail, but Lagos is an accountant and there is a solid business plan: the project is in profit if it sells 2,000 tonnes of pellets; it is targeting a market share of less than 1.5% of the region's households.

By 2017 it should be selling 6,000 tonnes, sustainably sourced from the local forest, and showing a handsome return on investment.

It is, in short, a near-perfect social enterprise, or community interest company: an entrepreneurial activity focusing on social good, financial reinvestment, and sustainability.

More familiar overseas, it's a very new concept in Greece.

"We've only just got the law to allow it," says Fiori Zafeiropoulou, an academic specialising in social entrepreneurship at universities in Greece and Britain who helped the government draw the law up. "Until now, you couldn't combine a social objective with profit; from this month, you can."

Lagos's project, called We Protect the Forest, came second at a recent Athens event, StartUpLive, organised to identify promising social enterprises. The winner was IncludAbility, which aims to fund disability awareness programmes in schools and the workplace by selling consultancy services to companies keen to improve their accessibility to people with disabilities, or as part of corporate responsibility programmes. It also aims to launch a website where people can exchange information on how welcoming and accessible places like shops and restaurants are.

"This really isn't an area that's had much attention in Greece," says Vassilis Kalyvas, one of the project's founders, who has been doing one part of the work voluntarily in Greek schools for several years. "There's EU legislation, but it's not implemented. Disability in Greece is synonymous with incapability, negativity. We need to do far more to facilitate the inclusion of people with disabilities in all areas of Greek life."

Also recognised at the event was Women on Top, which has set up a mentoring network where Greek women can find appropriate mentors for support and advice in their careers. The scheme's Facebook group has 300 members and 13 mentoring pairs already formed; it hopes to fund a full-service website by organising paid-for seminars, selling advertising targeting women, and perhaps charging a small annual subscription to mentorees.

Greece's new law is a good one, says Zafeiropoulou: up to 35% of a company incorporated as a social enterprise can be redistributed, but only to employees on the payroll, and 60% must be reinvested. It's also backed by a government social fund, with a limited amount of money now available for Greek "social co-operatives". She hopes it will lead to more projects like these. Gathered at Loft2Work, a co-working space in central Athens with a strong focus on social business, all agreed that it is simplistic – not to say untrue – that there is "no sense of community" in Greece. It is just that it rather got forgotten. Projects like these fit Greece's current needs, and its mood.

"There are really very healthy cells, micro-environments in Greece that are doing well and working and really achieving good things," says Vassilis. "This is what has to happen in Greece now. We're fed up waiting for the state to act, fed up with waiting for the top to do it. It has to come from the tail, now. We have to do it ourselves."

• Jon Henley is in Greece telling real people's stories. Please contact him if you have suggestions for people he could see or places he could go, or send him your personal story (not too long, please …). He will post as much as he can on the blog

Afghanistan shelves plans for ambassador accused of fraud

Mohammad Daud Yaar, accused by Afghan family in US of defrauding them, had been chosen as ambassador in London

Mohammad Daud Yaar, the director of economic affairs at the foreign ministry in Kabul, was chosen as ambassador in London

Afghanistan has quietly shelved plans to send a man accused of fraud in the US to head its embassy in Britain.

Mohammad Daud Yaar, director of economic affairs at the foreign ministry in Kabul, had been chosen for the high-profile job, with confirmation expected to be little more than a formality. But last week the Guardian reported that an Afghan immigrant family in California had accused Yaar of defrauding them. In 2010 they obtained a civil court judgment against him. Yaar admits to owing the family $100,000 but says he intends to pay them back.

In the wake of the fraud claims, a government spokesman in Kabul had said his nomination was "proceeding as normal". But sources now say that, although Daud's contacts may protect his longer-term hopes of an ambassadorial posting, his candidacy for London is on hold.

Yaar is a long-standing and close friend of Mahmoud Karzai, the influential brother of Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai. Yaar lived with another Karzai brother, Ahmed Wali, in Chicago in the late 1980s and 90s. He had been expected to arrive in London shortly.

It is understood the decision to pull the plug on his nomination came last Friday after Karzai and several senior ministers returned from a summit of regional leaders in Beijing.

The British embassy in Kabul said it did not comment on ambassadorial appointments until they were confirmed.

UK foreign secretary William Hague, visiting Kabul for an international conference on Afghanistan's future, also declined to comment, but said on Wednesday he was not concerned that Kabul had gone months without appointing an ambassador.

Yaar's imminent appointment had followed a year in which London lay vacant as Kabul struggled to find a consensus candidate for what is considered one of the most prestigious diplomatic posts. There are now likely to be further delays. "Embassies do continue to operate without ambassadors for extended periods of time, but obviously we will welcome an Afghan ambassador in due course," Hague told a news conference.

Sources outside Afghanistan say Yaar secured the UK job after intense behind-the-scenes lobbying by Mahmoud Karzai, whose business activities in the US are also being investigated. Yaar spent about 20 years in the US, where he worked as a part-time professor and also built up an extensive property portfolio.

He returned to Kabul in 2009 after the civil action. The plaintiffs, two Afghan-born brothers, Jamal and Ajmal Staneckzai, claim Yaar "tricked, defrauded and deceived" them over the 2001 purchase of a house in Fresno, California. Yaar insisted the case, from California's superior court in Contra Costa, was a business deal gone wrong. He vehemently denied fraud.

"If I had committed fraud, why did they settle?" he told the Guardian last week in his office in a low-rise building inside the sprawling grounds of the Afghan foreign ministry. "It was a business agreement and the other side backed off [from their side of the deal] and went to the courts. They couldn't prove anything."

Yaar said he was planning to pay off the remainder of the money he owed as soon as he could afford it, but his home in California was in negative equity and his small government salary in Kabul did not leave room for savings. He stressed: "My intention was to help these guys to solve their housing problem."

But one of his alleged victims told the Guardian Yaar was not a fit person to become UK ambassador, let alone hold responsibility in Kabul for big financial issues. Jamal Staneckzai said he had wanted to buy a home for his elderly parents, Ghani and Amani, who fled Afghanistan in the 1980s during the Soviet occupation.

Unable to get a mortgage, he and four other families from the close-knit Afghan community in California turned to Yaar for help. Yaar bought a property in 2001 on their behalf, but registered it in his own name. The Staneckzais made regular mortgage payments, with several family friends providing the initial deposit as a loan, he said.

In 2005 the Staneckzais were finally able to get a mortgage. When they asked Yaar to transfer the property to them he refused and sold it to them for $358,900, promising to refund the net proceeds.

Yaar never refunded the money, Staneckzai alleges. "I was a part-time student at university back in 2001, which is why I couldn't get a loan. We regarded Yaar as a close and respected uncle. He told us, 'You guys will pay the mortgage costs and I will transfer everything back to you". Instead he took every dollar from us. He took our equity."

Lenin's sojourn as curio corpse may be over

Displayed body of Bolshevik revolutionary Lenin, who died in 1924, should be buried, says Vladimir Medinsky. Photograph: Sergei Karpukhin/AP

When the minister Yuri Khariyakin told the Soviet parliament in 1989 that Lenin had expressed a wish to be buried alongside his mother in St Petersburg and that his embalmed body should be removed from the Red Square mausoleum, he encountered incredulity and anger.

Lenin's niece, Olga Ulyanova, even made a public statement to the effect that it was bare-faced lie her uncle had ever wanted to be interred with his mother.

Ever since the Soviet Union began to break apart there have been repeated attempts to put the founding father of Russian communism six feet under. But no political leader has yet dared to take the step many Russians regard as sacrilege.

So, Lenin lies to this day, looking more waxy with each passing year, in the constructivist red marble mausoleum in Moscow beneath the Kremlin's walls, an object of curiosity for tourists whom humourless guards forbid from speaking above a whisper or putting their hands in their pockets.

But the return of Vladimir Putin for a third term as president of Russia in May, could pave the way for Lenin's removal.

This week, Russia's new culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, re-ignited the controversy when he told the radio station Ekho Moskvy that Lenin should be buried.

"A body should be interred in the earth," Medinsky said who added that he was in favour of making it a state occasion. "I would observe all the appropriate ceremonies. As [Lenin] was a senior public figure the funeral should happen with all fitting state rituals, distinctions and a military salute in a suitable place."

With this observation, Medinsky was drawing a comparison with the treatment of Stalin, whose embalmed corpse was spirited away from its place beside Lenin one night in 1961 on the orders of Nikita Khrushchev and buried by the Kremlin's walls.

The famous mausoleum where Soviet leaders stood to review military parades, should stay, said Medinsky. "It must remain," he said. "It would be possible to turn it into a museum of Soviet history that would be very well visited and could have expensive tickets."

But the comments created such a furore that Medinsky had to clarify his position.

"It remains exclusively my personal opinion as a citizen," the culture minister, whose appointment Putin approved last month, later wrote on his blog.

While some parts of society, including the Orthodox church, support the idea of a burial, others are vigorously opposed.

The Communist party, Russia's second most popular political party, is particularly outspoken on the issue, which some suggest could be resolved by a referendum.

"Discussions about removal and re-burial have are simply provocative," Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the Communist party, said in 2009. "Any attempt to vulgarise or re-write the Soviet period and diminish the memory of Lenin … is an attempt to undermine the integrity of the Russian federation."

But many Communists are ageing and Medinsky's comments on the subject show that support may be growing for Lenin's final burial.

An April opinion poll suggested that 56% of Russians were in favour of removing the corpse, compared to 46% six years ago.

The head of Russia's National Bookmakers' Association, Oleg Zhuravsky, told the Izvestia newspaper this week that bets on Lenin being laid to rest in 2013 were becoming more and more frequent.

South Africa's corruption-tainted police force gets first female chief

n is whether someone who has no background in policing and the police as an organisation will be able to establish themselves to deal with the many difficulties the police have both internally and externally.

"Her appointment is a vote of no confidence in the senior police management. There are many good, honest and hard-working officers in the senior ranks, and this is a slap in the face. It's humiliating to have someone brought in from outside."

Burger accused the ANC of appointing police commissioners on the basis of allegiance to the party rather than their ability to fight crime. "Part of the problem was the need to transform; it came at a price. They decided the only way they could control the police was to appoint someone from the ranks of the ruling party rather than the police itself.

"It's wasn't even about race: there were some very talented and experienced black and coloured police officers but they chose to appoint someone from the governing party. Once you appoint them, then they make similarly poor appointments."

Iraq bombs kill scores of Shia pilgrims and police

Scenes of devastation after bomb blasts in Baghdad and cities in southern Iraq in which at least 57 people were killed Link to this video
Bombings and shootings targeting Shia Muslim pilgrims in Baghdad and police across Iraq have killed at least 66 people in apparently co-ordinated attacks during a major religious festival.

Violence in Iraq has eased off since the height of the war, but Islamists tied to al-Qaida are still a potent threat, often targeting Shia pilgrims in attempts to inflame the sectarian tensions that drove Iraq close to civil war in 2006 and 2007.

In the latest attacks in the capital, at least 18 people were killed when four bombs struck Shia pilgrims across Baghdad as they gathered to mark the anniversary of the death of the imam Mousa al-Kadhim, a great-grandson of the prophet Muhammad.

One of those blasts killed at least nine people as pilgrims passed through a police checkpoint in central Baghdad.

"A group of pilgrims was walking and passed by a tent offering food and drinks when suddenly a car exploded near them," said Wathiq Muhana, a police officer whose patrol was stationed near the blast in Karrada district.

"People were running away covered with blood, and bodies were scattered on the ground," he said.

Extra security and checkpoints have been in place this week as thousands of pilgrims arrive in Baghdad to meet at a shrine in the capital's northern Kadhimiyah district for the Shia religious festival.

In a separate attack on Wednesday in the mainly Shia southern city of Hilla, police said two car bombs, including one detonated by a suicide bomber, had exploded outside restaurants used by security forces, killing 22 people and wounding 38.

"When a minibus packed with policemen stopped near the restaurants, a car exploded near the bus," said Maitham Sahib, owner of a restaurant in Hilla near the blast. "It's heartbreaking. It is just sirens, and screams of wounded people."

Two more car bombs killed four people in the Shia city of Balad, a car bomb in Kerbala killed three and wounded 17, and another car bomb in Haswa, 30 miles (50km) south of Baghdad, killed one person and wounded four.

Five soldiers were also killed by gunmen in an attack on an army checkpoint in the south of the capital, police said.

Wednesday's attacks came at a sensitive time. On Sunday, at least six people were killed and 38 wounded when two mortar bombs struck a square packed with Shia pilgrims in Baghdad's Kadhimiyah district.

Earlier this month, 26 people were killed and more than 190 wounded when a suicide bomber detonated an explosive-rigged car outside a Shia religious office in the capital.

Al-Qaida's Iraqi affiliate, Islamic State of Iraq, claimed responsibility for the attack on the religious office.

Political tensions have been high in Iraq since the last American troops left in December, with the fragile government – split among Sunni-backed, Shia and ethnic Kurdish blocs – feuding over their power-sharing accord.

The Shia prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, is fending off attempts by Sunni, Kurdish and some Shia rivals to organise a vote of no confidence against him. Critics accuse him of trying to consolidate his position and failing to fulfil promises to share power among the blocs.

Syria crisis: Russia denies Hillary Clinton claim over helicopters

Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov at this week's press conference in Tehran. Lavrov denies Hillary Clinton's claim, saying the US are supplying arms to Syrian opposition. Photograph: Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
Russia has rebuffed US accusations that it is supplying armed helicopters to Syria as the regime of President Bashar al-Assad reported that its forces had defeated rebels in Latakia province.

Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, flatly denied a claim by his US counterpart Hillary Clinton that the aircraft were being delivered. Lavrov made clear that the supply of what he called "anti-air defence systems" was legitimate.

The US in turn denied Russian claims that it was arming anti-Assad rebels.

"We are not violating any international law in performing these contracts," Lavrov said during a visit to Iran. "They (the US) are providing arms and weapons to the Syrian opposition that can be used in fighting against the Damascus government."

The sharp public exchanges on Syria began on Tuesday when Clinton warned that Russian helicopters would "escalate the conflict quite dramatically".

Evidence is mounting that the Free Syrian Army, the opposition's main armed wing, has started receiving more and better weapons from Saudi Arabia and Qatar that are being delivered via the Turkish border. The US has been described as "co-ordinating" those efforts.

In violence on the ground the Syrian Revolution General Commission meanwhile reported 34 people killed across the country on Wednesday, mostly in shelling of Homs, Deraa and Deir ez-Zor.

Britain's foreign secretary William Hague, is to discuss Syria with Lavrov in a meeting in Pakistan on Thursday and will raise Russia's role in the crisis.

Hague said: "Syria is on the edge of a collapse, or of a deadly sectarian civil war. Of course there is room for debate about what constitutes a full civil war. But I think what we are trying to say is that its on the edge of something even worse."

France's foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, meanwhile echoed a senior UN official in stating explicitly that Syria was now in a state of "civil war". Fabius also said he would call on the UN security council to make mediator Kofi Annan's Syria peace plan mandatory. Annan's six-point plan is all but dead in the absence of a ceasefire or the implementation any of its other elements.

Tuesday's statement by Herve Ladsous, the UN's head of peacekeeping operations, was rejected out of hand by both the Syrian opposition and government.

The Syrian Revolution General Commission, an opposition body, complained that Ladsous's view "does not reflect the reality and does not represent the Syrian people". The announcement, it said, "makes the killer and the victim equal and ignores all the massacres committed by the Assad regime". It also masked "the real demands of the Syrian people who are only asking for freedom and dignity".

There was agreement, for different reasons, from the foreign ministry in Damascus: the remarks by Ladsous, it said, "did not reflect the reality" of what it happening in Syria. That is "war against armed groups that have chosen terrorism".

Syrian state TV reported that government forces have retaken control of the Haffa region near the Mediterranean coast after eight days of shelling and clashes. Hundreds of FSA fighters were believed to have been holed up there and pulled out after intense fighting.

Greek crisis: precarious funding pushes health and social services to extremes

Use of volunteers and donations at state-funded refugee centre and psychiatric hospital reveal impact of low cash and high debts

Immigrant families and homeless people receive food from members of a humanitarian group at a housing complex in Athens, Greece. Photograph: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP/Getty Images

As the volunteers unpack their shopping bags of rice, milk and cooking oil, Goman Badder retreats to the room he lives in with his wife and their one-year-old son. For the 28-year-old Syrian Kurd, the deliveries are a mixed blessing: he is relieved that his family will not go hungry, but humiliated that it has come to this. He had hoped for better things for his son, asleep on the neatly made bed.

"When I left Syria, I felt I didn't want him to be like me," he says. "But I never thought for him it would be like this: people bringing him Pampers and milk. If I'd known it would be like this I would never have brought him to this world."

His friend Salah Muhamed, a Kurdish teacher who fled the "hell" of Syria six months ago, did not mince his words. "In Syria, we will be killed by guns," he says. "Here, we will be killed by the economy."

For the past six months, this state-funded centre for asylum seekers has received no funding from the state. Its 25 staff members have not been paid since January. Due to its debts, the centre has "huge problems" with suppliers and the usual food deliveries stopped two weeks ago.

Some of the 225 residents thought the staff had gone on strike over pay but, as director Vasilis Lyritzis explains, they could simply not go on: "We just stopped cooking because we didn't have anything to cook. The moment that we have food, we cook again."

Even now, the inhabitants of the Lavrio centre, about 40 miles from Athens, are among the most fortunate of Greece's tens of thousands of asylum seekers, most of whom receive no support from the state and sleep rough in large, unsanitary slums in cities such as Athens.

But, as the debt crisis takes its toll on state services and the unpaid bills to suppliers mount up, Badder and Muhamed are being pushed to the extremes. And they are not the only ones. Across the country, some of Greece's most marginalised and vulnerable people who rely directly or indirectly on the state to feed them are now facing the possibility of having to turn to their neighbours for help.

On the island of Leros in the Dodeccanese, the governor of a psychiatric hospital has, in the past two weeks, like Lyritzis, found himself having to plead with suppliers to keep bringing food, despite an almost complete inability to pay them. Yiannis Antartis's suppliers stopped for a week, after which he found enough money to pay them each €15,000 (£12,000) – enough to encourage them to restart but far from enough to cover the hospital's total debts to them of €1.25m.

Antartis believes he has about a month to find money to pay the debts and protect the 400 patients, who have a range of mental illnesses, from depression to dementia and schizophrenia. Owed about €13m by its debt-ridden health insurance funds, the hospital, which is already sending samples to private labs for want of sufficient facilities, will soon be struggling for the basics, he said.

"If we don't receive money within three to five weeks we're going to have a real problem – for food, for medicines, for hospital supplies, bandages, even the basics," he says. "All levels of the hospital are going to start breaking down.

"My primary concern is to receive enough money to pay some outstanding bills in order to keep the hospital going, from the insurance funds, from the state, from wherever, just to be able to keep the hospital going. I am really worried about the fact that the hospital will not be able to function normally if we don't receive payment."

His position will be met with sympathy by the director of a state hospice in the Kypseli neighbourhood of Athens, who said last week that, as well as medicine shortages and an inability to pay energy bills, the institution had had no meat or chicken since 1 June.

Antartis has been the hospital's governor on and off since the 1980s, when it was revealed to be keeping patients naked and chained to their beds. He is adamant the institution bears no semblance to its former self. In 1988, he says, 1,600 patients were "piled up" in wards and looked after by fewer staff than today. Now, 120 of the 400 patients live relatively normal lives outside the hospital.

But, last week, Antartis was so concerned about supplies that he wrote to the health ministry and major political parties warning that patients were being poorly fed. Since then, he has managed to get the supplies coming in again and has met Greece's caretaker health minister, who, he says, showed understanding and promised a €150,000 payment by the end of June.

"But he [the minister] emphasised that the insurance funds do not have any money and that the hospitals have to keep every penny in order to keep going," Antartis says. Given the size of the debts and the interest rates on them, €150,000 "doesn't cover anything".

The inability of health insurance funds to pay their debts has caused chaos in the healthcare system, contributing to a shortage of medicines and the closure of dozens of commercial pharmacies.

Antartis is relieved the hospital managed to resolve – albeit temporarily – the problem with food supplies without the patients realising anything was wrong. But he remains concerned, particularly about medical supplies, as that is one area in which Leros's community, as active and kind as it is, will not be able to help. "I think the local people will help with food," he says. "But even that is going to be a problem at some point because for how long are they going to be able to help?"

One place where Greeks have reportedly already stepped in to fill the gap left by the state is Corinth, where the prison has had food shortages and people have started collecting goods for the inmates. Another is Lavrio, where donations have been keeping food on the table for the asylum seekers and refugees, among whom Lyritzis estimates there are 75-80 children. Some of the volunteers are hardly well-off themselves: Nadia, one of the members of a people's assembly from Athens which dropped off food at the weekend, is on Greece's new unemployment benefit of €360 a month and has had to go back to live with her mother.

"€40 or €50 just means I won't go out for a couple of days," she shrugs, loading bags of groceries into a waiting car.

Lyritzis, an employee of the Hellenic Red Cross which runs the centre, says the finance ministry has been unable to tell him when, or if, its funding might come. He says the centre had an estimated five days of food supplies left and he is in a very bad psychological state.

For Badder, who came to Greece in 2010 after alleged persecution due to his Kurdish ethnicity, that would be good news.

But if the situation is not alleviated, he would like to see the responsibility for his centre fall to a power outside Greece. He says: "The Greek people are very, very good. They look after us. But the Greeks have no money. Why must the Greeks bring us food? We are in Europe, not just Greece."

As the volunteers busied themselves in the courtyard, unpacking tins, toiletries and cartons of milk, he says: "The people here are so nice. We can't tell them: 'Don't bring food because we are ashamed'. We must say 'Thank you'. But we feel bad."

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