"At the health department, they were told that all the shareholders of the company would have to provide chest X-rays, and, in the most surreal demand of all, stool samples."

Can anyone from Greece confirm this? I've learned that when you read something on the Internet that seems too funny to be true, it often isn't.

I may be wrong, but it reminds me of sth called a 'health card' being needed in my country (.pl) when you are working with food. If it's true, it only proves their legal system concerning sanitary measures has way to broad categories and somehow olive-oil (food-based) falls into 'food' while running an online store falls into 'having a place where you deal with food'. Providing stool samples of shareholders is just an extreme example what happens when laws are too general and not in time with modern business models and current technology. It's easy to figure out that broad laws open to interpretation are easy to abuse by corrupted officials.

I don't know for a fact, but I doubt that this specific detail is enshrined in law. Much more likely is that the law requires certification from a bureaucrat that you are not carrying some terrible disease.

Greek bureaucrats have a lot of leeway and very little accountability, and their positions are openly coveted (among a portion of the population) for ability to extract bribes (it's very desirable to be a tax assessor, for example). These requirements may just be the bureaucrat's opening offer in the bribery negotiation, which can then be made "unnecessary for an upstanding citizen such as yourself".

It sounds too absurd to be true, but they are selling olive-oil and olive-oil derived foods and cosmetics.

Anything food-related, cosmetic-related, or even just olive-oil related is likely to have some arcane regulations, especially in the Mediterranean. (I've occasionally heard the olive oil industry being associated with cartels and frauds.) That goes for double if they are – or get confused with – a manufacturing facility which formulates its own products onsite.

Headline is wrong. Should read, "Why Greece is failing: internet entrepreneurs waste 10 months filling out paperwork"

edit: to say nothing of playing with their own %$!^

That's a great point. If their target was the non-domestic market, they wouldn't need a Greek domain and they probably could have hosted everything except for logistics in the UK or the US.

How would they have paid their taxes?

I know, I know, the common belief is that Greeks don't do that, but still they might want to declare some of the income.

Almost everything I read about the financial woes of Greece blames its government's inability to collect taxes, and not, say, beauracratic paperwork. So, excuse me if I'm suspicious of the causal implication of the article.

Greece is #100 out of 183 countries in terms of ease of doing business:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ease_of_Doing_Business_Index

The only European countries that have lower rank are Russia, Ukraine and Kosovo.

Greece does better than Brazil, Argentina and India though.

I don't think it's the inability to collect taxes as much as the people's willingness to pay into the "cost of civil society". When you have people who are supposed to be respected members of society (doctors, lawyers, etc.) reporting $20k of income while sailing on their yacht in the Aegean, it's hard to convince the normal working Joe that they should be honest and pay their fair share.

According to Transparency International's 2010 index of corruption, Greece ranked worst in Europe. I wouldn't find it surprising that all of these hurdles (some so ridiculous it's hard to believe) have been enacted to make sure everyone gets a bit of the honey.