Porsches and police cars rust in Greek government scrapyard – in pictures

Set up to offload army surplus after the second world war, ODDY began showing losses a decade ago, squeezed by competition while maintaining dozens of employees on staff. So when some 50 state entities were slated for closure in 2011, ODDY was on the list Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters

More than a year later, it has indeed been wound up. A ministerial decree in November announced ODDY no longer existed, and the European Union and International Monetary Fund, which are keeping Greece afloat on condition it slashes costs, duly noted in March that the required cuts had been legislated for Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters

But that is all on paper. Employees and government officials who spoke to Reuters have revealed that ODDY still exists in all but name, for as DDDY - no longer an Organisation, but now a Directorate - it has simply become an office of the Greek Finance Ministry. And while staffing has been cut, many costs have simply transferred from wages to pensions, and the shakeup has all but paralysed its ability to run auctions to make money Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters

The workforce has been halved since the debt crisis erupted in 2009 and the wages of those remaining have been cut. But as many who left simply retired and took a pension, the state may have saved little overall; meanwhile revenues, disrupted by a shunt into legal limbo, have tumbled, and assets gather dust in silent yards across Greece Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters

In Athens, the unit has held just one car auction this year, compared with one a month in better times. Even more bizarrely, the change of name and status led to its Internet access being cut off since March, hindering it even further in making sales Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters

Details from the story of ODDY, pieced together by Reuters from current and former employees and official records, illustrate some of the hurdles prime minister Antonis Samaras faces in his goal of saving up to €2bn by 2015 through scrapping some of the thousand or so similar agencies in the hope of persuading international lenders he can steer the budget towards balance Photograph: John Kolesidis/Reuters