Papandreou Says He Is Not To Blame For Corrupt NGO

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The trouble with the former prime minister, Mr. George Papandreou, is that he has never taken any responsibility for all the mistakes he has made. According to him, every decision he made -whether this was during the period he was a Minister, or even when he finally became prime minister- was for the good of the nation and its people. Of course, the numbers, the evidence and the news continually prove otherwise, but then again to understand George you have to either be a healthy alcoholic, or have a potent prescription for sedatives.

On Monday HellasFrappe featured a SPECIAL REPORT about a shady NGO that was formed under his run at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the period 2000-2004. Following a 20 month investigation, authorities discovered that this particular NGO - the International Mine Initiative (IMI) - that was formed to remove land mines from war-stricken countries was involved in fraud and money laundering. And what is worse, this organization has apparently gobbled up more than 8.9 million Euros in public funds! The head of the NGO -a well known journalist- has already been arrested, while three diplomats as well as several other retired foreign ministry officials have also been implicated in the case.

The scandal also surfaced the name of Mr. Alex Rondos, who many may recall is -and always has been- one of George Papandreou's closest associates. Rondos is the former general director of the foreign ministry's general directorate that oversaw Hellenic Aid, which distributed funds to NGOs.

This "mystery man" was also questioned in the case that has been investigating the assassination attempt against the former Prime Minister of Greece Costas Karamanlis. Rondos, who some suspect is the right hand of Soros himself, always shows up in nations that are considered global hotspots, or have energy potential. The trouble is that once he leaves these countries, chaos, riots, protests, etc. suddenly erupt. Read more about this by clicking HERE.

Looks like George did not get a lot of sleep on Monday night, or after the story broke, because early on Tuesday his office released an announcement warning that all of those who are attempting to implicate Papandreou in this case "will be exposed".

Papandreou, who more or less brought the idea of NGOs to Greece, said that he was the one who actually "put the NGOs in order."

(HELPPPPPPP. Pes mas ti pineis paidi mou kai den mas dineis!)

Without naming the IMI, Papandreou's office said that "on his own initiative, he (Papandreou) not only put an end to a regime that evaluated the NGO without any defined criteria and transparency, but he also launched specific institutional framework governing them."

Under Papandreou's run at the Foreign Ministry:

The concept of NGOs Was defined for the first time
He established a compliance Special Registry of NGOs and the evaluation process and to sign up.
He established conditions for the funding of NGOs.
A Certification and Evaluation committee was established for NGOs.
Also he formed a National Advisory Committee for NGOs. The results of this committee's meetings would then be documented in a report which was then sent to the Greek Parliament's permanent committee on Foreign and Defence policies.

Sounds like he set the foundation for NGOs to us, and not organized them as he states. Even Rondos more or less left it to be understood on Tuesday that before Papandreou took office NGOs were more or less non-existent in this country. And even if we give George the benefit of the doubt it still does not prove that there wasn't any monkey business going on with state funds. All it proves is that Papandreou more or less organized the NGOs or applied cosmetic touches to them so that they can look more credible.

There are plenty of reasons why we are suspicious of what George Papandreou says and does. One of which is from the countless reports in the Greek press, which clearly state that the party of gobbling up state funds continued even when the crisis began, and when George once again took over the Foreign Ministry in 2009. (He was both Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Greece).

Millions and millions of euros were apparently handed out by the Greek foreign ministry in 2010 while former prime minister George Papandreou was suffocating the Greek people by slashing pensions and salaries with bloody austerity measures as a cause of the memorandums he signed with the Troika. According to an article that was featured on HellasFrappe in mid December 2011, and based on the Sunday edition of “To Paron Tis Kyriakis” the number of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) under George's run at the Foreign Ministry climbed to a whopping 431 by 2010. And what is worse, the reports at the time said that in a decade alone -meaning from 2000 when he first took the reigns at the Ministry- more than 115,388,814 Euros (or about four billion drachmas) of state funds were handed out.

You see boys and girls... George had a plan and it was called “NGOs”.

La colpo grosso, a la Greek "NGO” is the brainchild of George Papandreou and the report in To Paron Tis Kyriakis had said that the NGOs began when Papandreou became foreign minister and started to fund various organizations, associates and relatives exorbitant and without any transparency. The same report was also featured on the Makeleio news site at the time claiming that over the last decade our ambassadors abroad were asked to report on the activities of all these foreign NGOs and how they have used the money the state funded them but they somehow always replied that they had no ability to check their credibility.

In other words... The state was handing out millions of Euros to NGOs, and noone cared to check on where this money was going.

The next shocking factor in that specific report in To Paron had also said that most of the NGOs that were funded at the time included personalities that were very close to Papandreou. This includes his very own mother who was operating an NGO for women's rights (the organization of which went by the title of KEDE or the Centre for Research and Action for Peace).

Legal? Yes. But is all this morally and ethically right?

Most of the money, claimed the article on Makeleio, was handed out in 2003, or a total amount of approximately 18,095,076 dollars when Papandreou was acting Minister of Foreign Affairs under the Simitis government.

Other close friends or acquaintances include his adviser while he has been President of PASOK, Julia Dimitriadis, as well as his former adviser Gregory Valianatos (who admitted that the George Soros foundation funded one of his organizations). Valianatos is also currently running as a candidate against Ilias Kassidiaris for the Mayor of Athens.

Other names include former PASOK minister Haris Pamboukis and his friend Spyros Flogaitis, a former journalist for the “Tsevelelou” publication by the name of Costas Tzevelekou, Papandreou’s friend and former chairman of the Federation of Industries of Northern Greece Mr. Nikos Efthimiadis, the present Mayor of Thessaloniki for PASOK Mr. John Boutaris, and PASOK Eurodeputy Maria Damanaki …. as well as many, many others adds the article in “Makeleio“.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that most of the names are from Papandreou’s close environment, or part of his political strategy group of friends and one can easily conclude that the NGOs represented by these people seem to have played an important role in his rise to the premiership of the country.

When Margret Papandreou said twelve years ago that her son was going to become Prime Minister of Greece, some smiled and said that every mother always wants the best for her children. Several years later she apparently said that the dynasty or name of Papandreou should be used to make money, but again some brushed it off, but from what it seems the family had a plan.

Zoom to 2014, the statement that was released by Papandreou's office also said that the former PM ordered the initial investigation into the case and that any attempts to link him to it had nothing to do with "truth and reality".

We don't know how much truth there is in that statement because some press reports are claiming that after PASOK lost the elections to the New Democracy party of Costas Karamanlis in 2004 a tonne of documents were removed from the Foreign Ministry and taken to the Greek parliament to be investigated.

Obviously the recent revelations about the NGO in question, must be the result of this investigation.

Also, if things were on the up and up so much then why doesn't Papandreou dare to say anything about the salaries that some of his associates were receiving at the ministry -basically the people who are now implicated of fraud and money laundering in this crony NGO-.

Papandreou's office even had the audacity to say that all of "those who are trying to implicate his name will be exposed."

That is a laugh. Who is trying to implicate Papandreou? He has already implicated himself! According to a report in Eleftherotypia (photo ABOVE) on Tuesday we discovered this:

Between 2001 and until 2003, George Papandreou's photograph appeared immediately below the logo of the International Mine Initiative, which is the NGO accused by police authorities today of defrauding the state of more than 8.9 million Euros.

The website does not exist anymore because it was shut down, but Eleftherotypia claimed that numerous versions of the IMI website are archived on the Wayback Machine.

And what is even more hillarious is that following a website redesign in 2003, Papandreou's image was joined by that of Andreas Loverdos, who was his acting deputy of foreign affairs at the time.

But this particular case is indeed unique, and that is because this NGO had received funding from the foreign ministry to clear land mines in countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Lebanon and Iraq, without ever following the proper procedures for obtaining NGO funding. Did they use scams to do this? Probably so, but we will allow judicial authorities to iron all that out. All we know is that the staff involved in this company -as press reports stated - handed over 20-30% of their salaries as "donations", enabling this particular NGO to apply for more funding. They were indeed greedy!

(Under Greek law, a quarter of the funds for development projects should be met by charities to enable the government to cover the remaining sum.)

This unprecedented scandal should not really come as a surprise to anyone. All the scandals that have erupted in this country over the last two decades and that involve money somehow always have someone from the PASOK party who is involved. We are not claiming that the conservatives are angels, but it does not compare in any which way to how corrupt the PASOK party was (and all who supported it. Incidentally... all these people have now moved over to the SYRIZA party). This type of behavior is a symptom of a much wider problem in Greece, where hundreds of similar organisations existed for decades, without proper oversight on their activities and, more importantly, their finances. Until recently, more than 600 NGOs were registered with Hellenic Aid, which is run by the finance ministry's directorate general of international development cooperation. It took authorities 20 months to investigate this case, imagine how long it is going to take to investigate all these organizations!

As an Eleftherotypia article pointed out, countries with similar populations to Greece, such as Holland and Denmark, have only 200 or so international developmental organisations, but in Greece this number is triple. We may be a small nation but we are LARGE when it comes to sucking out money from the state. Or at least some groups were. Thankfully, the fog is finally clearing.

All of this is a result of the onset of the crisis in Greece. The Greek Parliament, through its committee on institutions and transparency, actually had the b**lls to cast a light on the funding of these NGOs and they should be applauded for this. In a report, two MPs noted that there was an absence of a clear institutional framework governing the NGOs and a lack of coordination when it came to funding them. The MPs were apparently unable to determine the actual number of NGOs nor the amounts of subsidies that they have received, nonetheless they estimated that it ran to several hundred million Euros.

Whatever the case, the issue is now being investigated. The evidence that will surface will surely be interesting.

So is Papandreou to blame? ABSOLUTELY.

He is politically responsible for this whole mess.

He not only destroyed this nation's economy, and set us back 30 years but he also destroyed every chance this nation ever had of keeping its head out of water. And let us not even comment on how he handled some of our national issues because we would be here all night. All we know is that as a result of PASOK's "socialism" and George Papandreou's infamous line "money exists" more than 5,000 people have committed suicide as a result of this crisis, hundreds of thousands of people live without electricity, tens of thousands became homeless, over 150,000 businesses shut down, one third of the population is unemployed and almost half of the people in this country are either looking through rubbish bins or standing in a soup kitchen to get something to eat. We also know, that George never cared about this nation and its people,but rather worked hard to endorse other interests.

The Omertà against Papandreou has to end.

He should be held accountable for all his mistakes, and if he still has an ounce of decency he should finally acknowledge this.