Just over a decade ago, Napoleon Tsanis set out from Sydney with EUR 11 million and a dream to build a shrimp farm in his ancestral homeland.
What he got was years of wrestling Greek bureaucracy and a court battle with a civil servant. Tsanis eventually opened his shrimp farm, but even now the Greek-Australian has managed to invest just EUR 2 million (AUD 2.5 million), and that thanks to sheer stubbornness and a strong Australian dollar that has kept his venture profitable despite the delays.
Ask him for the root cause of Greece’s crisis and his answer is simple: the enormous regulatory burden that he says crushes the country’s economy.
