Greek Treason Charges Pointed At Wrong People, Says Yanis Varoufakis

Former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, under threat of a treason prosecution working on a “Plan B” currency response in case negotiations with the Troika failed, “wear their accusations as badges of honor,” he said in a blog post today.

Varoufakis could face treason charges if immunity overturned

Varoufakis was reacting to Greek state prosecutors who said he might face two criminal counts for his work in setting up a parallel payment system inside the eurozone monetary union. The cases were brought to the parliament by the Supreme Court after a group of opposition conservative parliamentarians and a Greek lawyer and mayor brought the charges to parliament.

Presently Varoufakis has immunity over criminal prosecution because he is a member of parliament, but this is currently being reviewed by Greece’s parliament which could overturn this immunity.

As previously reported in ValueWalk, Varoufakis said on a recorded conversation that he hacked into the tax minister’s computer in an effort to develop a payment system to introduce “parallel liquidity” to combat credit tightening, called “strangulation” in some quarters. In the recorded conversation he claimed he had been given the “green light” by current Greek Prime Minister Alxis Tsipras before he was elected.

Real prosecution is for defiance of Troika and ruling establishment

“The aim of my self-styled persecutors is to characterize our defiant negotiating stance as an aberration, an error or, even better from the perspective of Greece’s Troika-friendly oligarchic establishment, as a ‘crime’ against Greece’s national interest,” Varoufakis wrote. “My dastardly ‘crime’ was that, expressing the collective will of our government.” Such crimes include defying the Troika leadership by planning a contingency and revealing how Greek government agencies, such as the revenue office, are now effectively controlled by Brussels and by extension Berlin.

This loss of national sovereignty cannot be tolerated, he wrote. “It is amply clear that the Greek government has a duty to recover national and democratic sovereignty over all departments of state, and in particular those of the Finance Ministry. If it does not, it will continue to forfeit the instruments of policy making that voters expect it to utilize in pursuit of the mandate they bestowed upon it.”

Varoufakis says the government is going after the wrong people. “Instead of indicting, and persecuting, those who, to this day, function within the public sector as the troika’s minions and lieutenants (while receiving their substantial salaries from the long-suffering Greek taxpayers), politicians and parties whom the electorate condemned for their efforts to turn Greece into a protectorate are now persecuting me, aided and abetted by the oligarchs’ media.”

Read the full article here.