Did the PASOK government deliberately inflate the national deficit? Well according to the latest Wikileaks cable it did! WikiLeaks which has continued to release millions of emails from the intelligence company Stratfor, apparently exposed an email by a Greek informant to Stratfor on the Greek deficit, claiming that the deficit was purposely increased by the Greek government in order to place the blame of the state of the economy on the previous government!
According to the article in the TA NEA newspaper, which was also announced on MEGA channel's Saturday morning talk show, the Greek informant (and former candidate with the PASOK party) said that there was a deliberate increase made to the Greek deficit by the PASOK government. The informant who went by the code name GR101 underlined that the Greek government deliberately exacerbated the problem of deficit in 2009 (so that it can purposely blame the previous government for the country's economic crisis so that it can receive a larger assistance ($$) from international agencies by simply making payment on debts earlier than necessary. "For example, payments that could have been made in January 2010, were paid in November or early December 2009 so that they can deliberately increase (the level of) government spending."
The Stratfor official noted that the informant of the email, which was sent on January 16, 2010, or informant GR101, is a lawyer who is active in Brussels, and added that his informant was very reliable and had very good contacts in the Greek government. The Stratfor official does point out however, that the allegations were termed as rumors by his informant.
What is interesting to note with this particular Stratfor email is that it was sent one week before Eurostat's report on the 2008 Greek statistics.
The only thing that remains to be seen now is what the parliamentary committee will decide since time is ticking on the investigation that is probing to see if the Greek public 2009 deficit was purposely falsified so that the government can have an excuse to implement tough austerity measures. The final figure exceeded 15 percent of gross domestic product, whereas it had been projected to reach only a third of that.
WikiLeaks has continued to release what it says will eventually be 5 million emails that were sent from the private intelligence company Stratfor that are focused on the period between July 2004 and late December 2011. The emails were obtained from a series of hacking attacks against Stratfor in December 2011. In Greece they are usually released by the TA NEA (a Greek newspaper).
Read More Wikileaks cable here
Read more About the ELSTAT case here