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Website campaign to bail Greece raises €1.4m

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A new bailout fund for Greece has raised more than €1,368,000 – so far around €1,558,600,000 euros short of the €1.56 billion ($1.72 billion) debt due to the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday.

In total, Greece owes over €20 billion to the IMF.

The effort is via Indiegogo, a crowd-funding website more typically used by entrepreneurs to raise cash to support their ideas.

The campaign for Greece, the brainchild of 29-year-old Thom Feeney who lives in London, is calling on the 503 million citizens of the European Union to “chip in a few euro” to help the austerity-stricken Greeks.

If every EU citizen contributed €3 — about the price of half a pint of beer in London –Greece could be “sorted,” Feeney said on his campaign page.

Greece became the first Western country to go into arrears on its debt to the International Monetary Fund after failing to meet Tuesday’s deadline for repayment.

While Mr. Feeney had collected pledges of more than 1.3 million euros as of early Thursday, Greeks are unlikely to ever see the money. That’s because those who have pledged to the campaign only have to pony up if he achieves his full target of €1.6 billion within the next five days.

Indiegogo said on its site that the campaign – so far backed by over 78,000 people from 167 countries–is the largest group of people in the site’s history to ever support a single campaign. “The message is just as important as the funds raised,” the site said in a blog post.

But not all crowd-funding sites are as enthusiastic about bailing out Greece.

“This whole thing is phony,” said Mathieu Maire du Poset, vice-president of French crowd-funding site Ulule. “The money will never be raised and the person who launched the fundraising doesn’t have the capacity to deliver the compensations he promised,” he said.

Maire du Poset said Ulule had rejected fund raising campaigns to bailout Greece because they were not credible. “Our role is not to do macroeconomics, but to fund real projects,” Maire du Poset said.

And a Kickstarter campaign for Facebook FB +0.43% chief Mark Zuckerberg to bail out Greece so far has zero backers.
Read Also: Greek central bank issues ‘painful’ warning

Mr. Feeney rejected the charge that his campaign was a sham. “A campaign which has so far had pledges over well over €1m and gained much publicity for the plight of ordinary Greek citizens is far from phony,” he said in an email.

Slava Rubin, CEO of San Francisco-based Indiegogo said in an emailed statement that if the campaign does reach its fund-raising goal, Indiegogo “will collaborate with the campaigner to get in touch with Greek authorities and determine the best way to transfer the funds to the Greek government.”

– Wall Street Journal

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