The time has finally come for the creation of a parliamentary committee to investigate the so-called 'Lagarde list' - a list of Greek citizens with bank accounts in Switzerland suspected of having evaded taxes. SYRIZA, Greece's main opposition force, presented parliament on Tuesday with a proposal for a sweeping investigation into the handling of the case by former finance minister George Papakonstantinou as well as PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos. As such, at least seventy-one deputies of SYRIZA, headed by their leader Alexis Tsipras, tabled a motion in Parliament for the creation of a preliminary investigation committee to examine the 'Lagarde list' and why it was not utilised by the government to track possible large-scale tax evasion.
According to SYRIZA, the committee must probe possible penal responsibilities of former finance ministers George Papakonstantinou and Evangelos Venizelos "in relation to their actions and omissions concerning the managing of the Lagarde list". The party also attributes "great political responsibilities" to the prime ministers who supervised the two ministers - mainly George Papandreou, as well as Lucas Papademos and Antonis Samaras.
SYRIZA also criticised another motion for a committee voted by deputies of the coalition government parties, because it only focused on Papakonstantinou, saying "is nothing more than a crude trick by the present government so as to obscure the case in all its apects and to protect every other person involved, including in particular the useful Mr Venizelos".
Both motions are expected to be discussed in the parliament's plenary session and must be approved by 151 deputies in the 300-member parliament for the committee to be set up.
On Monday night, former finance minister George Papakostantinou revealed his "own truth", to reporter Elli Stai on the NET channel in his first televised interview after being accused of tampering with the controversial list. Papakostantinou said that he did not distort the information on the list, that he has no idea who might of actually tampered with it, but noted that an electronics expert can easily and quickly find out when this was done by simply examining the data on the memory stick. At the same time he also underlined that he was being framed with this crime and more or less pointed towards his successor Evangelos Venizelos, noting that he will not go to jail so that the government is not toppled for something he did not do.
Unfolding the sequence of events, the former minister said that in early October 2010 when he received the controversial cd, he gave it to one of his associates to separate the names of the largest depositors and add up the total amount of funds in these deposits. According to him, several days later his assocaite returned and gave him the list of depositors with the largest sums.
Asked why he only gave 20 names to Greece's Financial Crime Squad (SDOE) and not the entire list, the former minister said that he was afraid that the data would be leaked but added he gave the names with the largest deposits on the list which were signalled out by his associate to the then Head of the Financial Crime Squad Mr. G. Kapeleris. He argued that if all 2,000 names were given, then the work would have to be distributed and therefore a leak could have occurred.
To protect the CD, he then said that he instructed his colleagues to copy the data onto a memory stick -or usb-.
When asked to comment about the names on the CD that were erased -and that are directly related to him- Papakonstantinou insisted that he never saw the list and had no idea that they were listed there.
When asked if former premier George Papandreou was informed about the information, the former finance minister noted that Papandreou had indeed been informed about the case, before the information came into Greek hands. He said that when he gave the information to SDOE and the investigations began, the former PM was once again briefed and that his answer was to proceed with the case.
In regards to Evangelos Venizelos, Papakostantinou admitted that he did not brief him about the controversial list because, as he said, it was an operational issue and the duty of the new head of SDOE Mr Diotis. He did, however, hint that the investigation of the data that was initiated by him did not continue after Venizelos replaced him at the Ministry.
Venizelos, who is a professor of constitutional law by profession, argues that he decided not to pursue the names on the list after the head of SDOE informed him that the information could not be used because it had been "obtained illegally".
Obviously this does not really stick, because other countries that were handed similar lists by the French authorities – initially stolen by a renegade bank clerk at HSBC – did not have such compunctions, with Spain and Italy both raising huge amounts in revenue by pursuing suspected tax evaders.
"The most interesting question is why, of all the countries that received the same list, Greece is the only one that did not use it," Tsimas wrote in the weekend edition of Ta Nea. It was, he said, especially odd, given that Greece was the leading state in Europe, and the second in the world, in terms of tax evasion and a black economy.
This is why SYRIZA has raised the political temperature by demanding that parliament also investigate Venizelos, who replaced Papakonstantinou and is now one of the government's tripartite leaders. SYRIZA wants to know why the list was kept a secret and never investigated during the government of George Papandreou.
On its part, PASOK accused SYRIZA of trying to unsettle the government and fuel a crisis in order to exploit the 'Lagarde list' to its advantage at national elections.
The truth is, that if Venizelos were implicated in the scandal it would place serious pressure on the ruling coalition government at a time when Greece's continued membership of the euro zone is still far from assured. The coalition is already under immense strain over the adoption of draconian austerity measures to trim budgets by an estimated 9.2 billion Euros this year alone.
Stay tuned, the temperature is definately rising!
VIDEO - Full Interview With Papakostantinou on NET Channel.
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