Greece seeks to plug 'Bermuda Triangle' of lost taxes

Athens

IT COULD be a scene from a thriller: a ghost ship abandoned in the crystal-clear bay of a Greek island, its hold crammed with millions of illegal cigarettes, the crew nowhere to be seen.

And no one knows where the freighter Amaranthus or its cargo were bound for when it beached on the island of Zanthe off the Ionian coast of western Greece in December.

But such discoveries are now almost routine for police as cigarette and petrol smuggling has become big business in crisis-hit Greece.

Every country in Europe has a problem with cigarette smuggling but in Greece - which has the highest proportion of smokers of any developed country - it has mushroomed since the economy sank into …