The Greek Supreme Court received an official complaint which calls for an immediate and urgent investigation to be conducted into the alleged tampering of the Greek deficit, since evidence is pointing towards this direction.
Representing tens of lawyers in the Greek capital, President of the Athens Bar Association, John Adamopoulos issued a formal complaint and called on the Supreme Court to intervene on this matter at once since evidence is suggesting that the Hellenic Statistical Authority (EL.STAT) inflated the Greek deficit in 2009 from 12-13% to 15.4%, thus obligating Greece to sign the Memorandum (of shame) and in consequence threw Greece into recession.
In other related news, the former chairman of the Greek Statistical Authority told reporters last week that how an official agreement in 2009 between the European authority and ELSTAT bypassed protocol to bump up public deficit ahead of financial aid deals with the Troika (EU, IMF, European Central Bank).
The story broke out two weeks ago when a former board member of ELSTAT publically claimed that the issue involved the current chairman Andreas Giorgiou who quite coincidentally has also served on the IMF (Olympia had an amazing story on this one).
Georgiou was appointed president of ELSTAT in 2010.
It was claimed that the statistical data was calculated in such a way so as to look as though it was the largest in Europe, by including debts from the utility companies (something that is not done by other EU member states) so that it can appear even higher than that of Ireland who at that time was to present a 14% deficit.
Syriza member Dimitris Papadimoulis said on PressTV that the “IMF agreements brings us closer to defaulting and the Greek government is failing once again by cooking up the ELSTAT data, the accusations regarding the ELSTAT data is only the icing on the cake”.
On his part Leonidas Vatikiotis said that the statistical lies made the bailout of Greece appear as being an “inevitable» choice. And he added that this happened because the IMF, EU and the Greek government did not want to even consider the real statistical data.
Hellasfrappe will continue to follow this story, click here for more details
Hellasfrappe will continue to follow this story, click here for more details
This video is a wrap-up, for a detailed report watch second video below
Former Finance Minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou who was responsible for the Agency back in 2009 swiftly dismissed the accusations stressing that unfortunately deficit was indeed 15.4%.
This week our heroin Zoi Georganta (a former ELSTAT board member) testified for six hours before two prosecutors within the framework of the investigation.
Georganta, professor of econometrics, appeared before First Instant Court Prosecutor Popi Papandreou in the presence of Financial Prosecutor Grigoris Peponis, who is investigating the case to establish whether her allegations are standing and to determine if criminal violations were committed.
The entire ELSTT board, with the exception of Georgiou was ordered to resign by Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos in a surprise decision earlier in the month.
According to reports, Georganta said that the upward revision was made possible by including expenditures from public utilities in the general government spending, stressing that some of those public utilities companies are now included in the personnel redundancy programme applied via the labour reserve measure.
Georganta maintained that this method is in conflict with the Eurostat practices considering that studies and statistical calculations that are deemed as imperative and should have taken place in advance were never held in the controversial wider public sector companies.
Former EL.STAT vice-president Nikos Logothetis would testify (his testimony is to be included in a follow up report). Logothetis has made similar accusations as regards the 2009 deficit via a memo he had forwarded to the prosecutor's office. He is also facing felony charges for violation of personal data protection after ELSTAT President Andreas Georgiou accused him of hacking into his email account.
Hellasfrappe will continue to cover this story,
for a related link on this controversial issue click here
The video below is a two-hour video of the parliamentary committee’s investigation.
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