By Andy Dabilis | Greek Reporter

Scrapping to find every euro cent it can in a crushing economic crisis, the Greek government is hoping to find billions of euros in revenues from abandoned properties, forgotten bank deposits, vacant inheritances, national legacies and other unused assets and properties

The Finance Ministry said it would sift through scores of thousands of cases and appointed three university professors to investigate how much money could be obtained and total a list of forgotten assets that could be legally seized.

According to a 1942 law, any bank accounts that remain idle for more than 20 years are deemed inactive and their deposits come under the state’s ownership. Their current level is not known.

There are about 11,000 legacies willed to the state with an estimated value of about 10 billion euros, or $13 billion and government officials said they expect they could gain at least 2 billion euros, or $2.6 billion. There are also 3,000 unused inheritances the state could get, worth about $5.2 billion.

There could be some legal problems, however, as most of the legacies and inheritances have long been idle as the processing of a vacant inheritance by its Finance Ministry-appointed guardian can take over 30 years. Guardians are appointed from a list that is not updated, and the guardian’s work is not evaluated.

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