Fee

The range and the levels of fees and commissions that local banks can charge retail and commercial clients have been lowered, the Turkish Central Bank and the country's banking watchdog regulator (BDDK) have announced.

The measures will cut the various charges banks can charge financial consumers to 16 from 20, the BDDK said.

Piraeus Bank customers complained this week after seeing they had been charged an annual fee of 5 euros each for the lender's online banking ("winbank") service, despite it having promised not to impose such a charge.

Inspectors of Greece's Competition Commission raided the headquarters of the country's four systemic banks and the Hellenic Bank Association on Thursday, as part of its investigation into possible cartel practices in the imposition of charges, sources said.

The Council of State, Greece's top administrative court, upheld a lower court decision to slap a 3.46-million-euro fine on OTE Telecom for installing phone booths in the northern port city of Thessaloniki without permission from the municipality.
A section of the court decided that the ruling of an administrative appeal court in Thessaloniki was in line with its case law.

The new charges banks have imposed on most of their services customers' transactions will be discussed in a meeting of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis with the heads of the country's biggest banks on Thursday.

The new charges are an effort to offset the sector's losses from interest takings, which have been in constant decline over the last few years.

Bosnia is taking loans for infrastructure projects that invariably face years of delays, resulting in big bank fees.

The tuition fees for universities run by private foundations increased 20 percent annually, a handbook released by the public authority in charge of university placements has revealed.

Opening a company in a country that is not the investor's home country is no longer a difficult goal as the openness of most governments towards foreign investors has increased substantially in the last few years. This is why opening a business abroad can now have more benefits than setting up a company in one's home state.

While Greece has managed to digitalize much of its bureaucracy, this has not reduced red tape or made it cheaper. Indeed, Greeks pay indirect taxes amounting to hundreds of millions of euros for financial as well as personal transactions, hidden in the form of an administrative fee, known as "paravolo" in Greek.

The Economy and Development Ministry on Friday approved the investment plans of 1,170 new businesses out of 5,626 that had applied to be included in the "New Enterpreneurship" program funded by the National Strategic Reference Framework 2014-2020.