A mega bomb exploded in parliament on Tuesday that in normal circumstances would send the head of the Greek Statistics Authority (ELSTAT) Andreas Georgiou, straight to jail when officials surfaced an email showing that he asked IMF officials to intervene and pressure the Greek government to change the law on ELSTAT’s operating methods because he was having difficulty getting board members to cooperate. The ELSTAT chief, who was hand selected by former Finance Minister George Papakonstantinou (and present Minister of the Environment who is also coincidentally overlooking all of the oil exploration tenders!) was called to give evidence to financial prosecutor Grigoris Peponis in connection to the claims made by two former employees that he purposely falsified and inflated the 2009 deficit figure to justify the EU-IMF bailout.
Georgiou, who took over at ELSTAT in the summer of 2010, denies any wrongdoing and told Peponis that Eurostat had been expressing concern about the accuracy of Greek statistics for some time before he was put in charge, while he added that Eurostat officials visited Greece 10 times between 2009 and 2010 to check on the procedures being used.
According to press reports, Georgiou refused to comment on extracts of a leaked e-mail that was addressed to the head of the IMF team in Greece, Poul Thomson, and which was surfaced by independent MP Panayiotis Kouroblis. A report on defencenet said that the e-mail indicates that Georgiou had asked Thomson to pressure the Greek government to change the law on ELSTAT’s operating methods because he was having difficulty getting board members to cooperate. In fact in the letter he says that the proposed amendment should be passed "as is" as soon as possible, since the situation was getting tense with "every" passing day.
Georgiou refused to comment on this message as said that it was obtained by someone hacking into his e-mail account.
Kouroumplis notes that the email has a significant political importance, because the head of the Greek Statistics Authority - who was appointed by the President of the Greek Parliament - cannot seek solutions on state issues "from Thomson", while he also demanded that Georgiou resign immediately.
It needs to be reminded that MPs are investigating how Greece’s public deficit was formed in 2009. The final figure exceeded 15 percent of gross domestic product, whereas it had been projected to reach only a third of that.
Professor at the University of Macedonia and former committee member of ELSTAT Zoe Georganta, who outwardly accused Papakonstantinou of purposely “falsifying” Greece’s deficit in 2009, says that the methods used for calculating the deficit was in total CONFLICT with Eurostat practices. In previous articles here on hellasfrappe we had quoted Georganta as saying that the Greek deficit for 2009 was deliberately estimated at 15.4%. "The deficit was artificially inflated in 2009 to show that the country had the largest across Europe, including that of Ireland which was 14% in order to justify the severe measures the government wanted to impose on the country. And (that is why) Eurostat presented it at 15,4%“. (Read that story here)
Indeed, a new figure emerged after PASOK came to power in November 2009, leading to panic on the markets, unsustainable high borrowing costs for Greece and, ultimately, the creation of the country’s emergency loan package.
New Democracy and the Communist Party are boycotting the committee but this did not deter its members, who sent letters on Tuesday to former EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia and the director-general of the EU’s statistics agency, Eurostat, Walter Radermacher, to ask them to give evidence as part of the probe.
In any other country in the world Georgiou would have been arrested immediately, but in today's Greece he left freely, and this is because we are governed by a green regime that totally stinks corruption.
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