PASOK In Turmoil - Punches Fly - Lagarde List Burns Papakonstantinou

Four MPs might of returned to PASOK on Wednesday, only a few weeks after being written off for opposing the latest austerity package, but their return did not disguise the deepening tension in the socialist party. In fact their return comes in a period when supporters of George Papandreou are openly casting doubts on Evangelos Venizelos’s leadership, while new revelations from the ongoing probe on the Lagarde List is a ticking bomb that is ready to explode!

The return of Costas Skandalidis, Angela Gerekou, Michalis Kassis and Yiannis Koutsoukos came at a time when PASOK is getting set to hold its party congress at the end of February. In the run-up to the party congress, preparations have led to tension within the party.

Basically, about 75 members, who still support Papandreou, including some MPs, issued a statement expressing concern about the way the congress is being planned and their intervention was viewed as casting doubts on Evangelos Venizelos’s leadership. The atmosphere really heated up on Wednesday night when members faithful to George Papandreou came to blows with those supporting Venizelos at the party's headquarters over complaints that the congress participants had not been announced yet.

And if that wasn't enough, PASOK could even suffer further turmoil from the parliamentary inquiry into the Lagarde list since it was announced on Wednesday that the day George Papacostantinou received the data from France he checked for the names George Papandreou, Papakostantinou, Economou and Kozani. More exactly, authorities briefed MPs that files containing the names of some 2,000 Greek depositors had been opened on September 30, 2010, hours after the CD with the list was given to Papakonstantinou and that the person opening them had used 28 keywords to search the data, including “George Papandreou,” “Papakonstantinou” and names of other politicians and businessmen.