Golden Dawn spokesman Ilias Kassidiaris was catapult in today's parliamentary session when reacting to the plethora of insults and wisecracks from other parliamentary members who continue to characterize Golden Dawn a "neo-Nazi party". Kassidiaris asked the leadership of the parliament to delete this word from all daily records whenever it is repeated by any MP. (It's about time!)
Following this, Kassidiaris decided to direct every one's attention to the scandalous arrests of several PASOK MPs. This heated up the debate in parliament but he was soon cut off when he began talking about the "criminal organization of PASOK". In fact he faced the fury of the vice-president of parliament Mr. Kalantzis who was presiding over the session and who continued to rudely cut him off and prevent him from expressing his views.
Kassidiaris may represent an extremist party, but he made some pretty good points. PASOK is up to its eyeballs in scandals. Remember the Bank of Crete scandal?
One of the many scandals that emerged in Greek politics in the late 1980s when PASOK was in full power, the most notorious by far was the so-called Koskotas affair or bank of Crete scandal. In the 90s it was the famous Siemens scandal, the overcharged works for the Athens 2004 games, the numerous telecom contracts and defence contracts that were signed with Germany and so on... and so on... Also and following the assassination of Brigadier Saunders by the terrorist group 17 November (17N) in 2000, there are numerous reports from the western media which had gone as far as accusing PASOK of colluding with the terrorists (or the notorious November 17 organisation)!
And let us not even touch the subject of Theodore Pangalos, Costas Simitis, George Papakostantinou, and George Papandreou and the scandals that they are implicated in. Our blog would probably need more web space just to analyze each scandal separately!
Friends, Kassidiaris is not the only one that has characterized PASOK a "criminal organization". Independent Greeks leader Panos Kammenos has suggested that PASOK should be considered a criminal organization because a number of its members have been linked to corruption scandals, but only former Defense Minister Akis Tsochatzopoulos has been tried and convicted so far.
Kammenos is right. Many of PASOK's former ministers have already been charged of crimes such as kickbacks, money-laundering and even bribery. One MP -who was almost elected to the party's leadership- is already serving time at the Korydallos prison for all the above reasons, a second is said to be in Brazil somewhere -but we discovered that he was on the Lagarde List-, a third is due to give his deposition on November 25th for openly admitting to accepting kickbacks from a German telecom company and a fourth -although he has confessed of taking kickbacks- has yet to be charged of anything even though he openly admitted on camera that what he did was illegal!
Not even the Italian Camorra operates this way. So you can't really blame Kassidiaris of getting the wrong impression now can you....
Watch the video.
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