Greece’s Defense Ministry will distribute tablets to conscripts in the context of a program to “upgrade digital skills in the military service.” The cost for 10,000 tablets has been calculated to be over 56 million euros, that is over 5,600 euros per table excluding VAT.
The initial announcement for the purchase was made before Defense Minister Nikos Dendias was assigned to this post, that is before the July elections.
Several opposition media and military news websites have been waiting for an official statement explaining ‘this waste of public money,” – so documentonews.gr. There has not be any so far.
“The total cost is 56,763,692.00 euros! That is, 5,676 euros for each tablet. While a very good tablet costs around 500 euros at retail,” noted the Sunday newspaper.
Taking into account also the education cost for the training in these “super tablets” the newspaper added “The ELIC computer training and necessary certification costs from 100 to 300 euros depending on the days of training one needs. There one learns much more than using a tablet (word, excel, etc.).
There is also a difference for a private person to pay for this cost or for the Army to pay for thousands of trainees. So let’s say that training costs 200 euros and 100,000 soldiers will be trained.
Thus we have: 500 X 10,000 = 5,000,000 and 200 X 100,000 = 20,000,000. Total cost 25 million euros.
“In other words, more than 31 million euros are ‘missing’ on order for the purchase cost to make any sense,” the news paper stressed.
it should be noted that some Greeks on social media made a search for super tablets and noted that the most expensive one they found was at 3,500 euros incl. VAT.
PS Maybe the tablets have a software directly linking them to the Ancient Greek Laptop…as KTG reported a few years ago.