Greece: Where Honesty Gets You Indicted

Kafka Once Again Alights in Athens

Greece is well known for its deep-seated tangle of corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency. Just as a reminder, here are a few examples: there was e.g. a state-financed hospital in Athens that employed 45 gardeners, but actually had no garden. It was once worked out that if the Greek government were to shut down the state-owned railway system completely and were to simply pay the taxi fares of commuters instead, it would save a fortune.

A USB stick containing the prominent names of the biggest Greek tax evaders provided to the government  by the IMF simply 'disappeared' in a drawer of the finance minister's desk –  too many of his political friends and cronies were apparently on it (the journalist revealing this fact was promptly charged with a criminal offense, charges that were only dropped after intense international protests).

One 'civil servant' – an otherwise unknown bureaucrat, Nikos Kannelopoulos, department head in the ministry of culture – was found to own 10 properties (including the four story apartment building which contains his own 1,356 square foot/126 m² apartment) plus bank accounts containing almost € 9 million upon his retirement in 2008. There are so many similar examples that making an exhaustive list would take us all week. We've picked out this particular case because if even a bureaucrat in the ministry of culture found enough corruption opportunities to get filthy rich, imagine what bureaucrats and politicians in more important positions were able to skim off for themselves. Can anyone blame ordinary Greeks if they refuse to be robbed  by the huge tax increases that were imposed in the name of 'austerity'? Effectively the 'troika' is attempting to force ordinary Greek citizens to pay for the decades of brazen theft enabled by the criminal organization known as the Greek State.

Following the bizarre prosecution of Kostas Vaxevanis (the journalist who published the list of names of the corrupt officials with Swiss bank accounts),  an even more Kafkaesque indictment  has been handed down now. In fact, in the Vaxevanis case it was least still possible to argue that the protection of personal data was more important than the public interest in prosecuting corruption at the highest levels of government.

The latest example showing that honesty just doesn't pay is the indictment of the new head of Greece's government statistics office, Andreas Georgiou. His alleged crime: after Greece lied for years about its deficits, reporting them to be far smaller than they actually were, Georgiou is accused of reporting too high a deficit.

Der Spiegel reports:

“The hour was late, but Andreas Georgiou was still at his office last Friday evening. He sounded calm and poised, certain that he had done his duty. But Georgiou, 53, also sounded dumbfounded. "It strikes me as odd," he says, "that we are being prosecuted in a European Union member state for actually following European law." When Georgiou decided in the summer of 2010 to take over leadership of the revamped, newly independent Greek statistics service ELSTAT, he never imagined that the position could land him a jail sentence. But at the end of January, felony charges were filed against Georgiou and two senior ELSTAT staffers for allegedly inflating the 2009 deficit. In other words, at a time when the rest of the world was furious that Greece had artificially improved the country's budget statistics, Greek prosecutors are accusing Georgiou of doing the opposite. Prosecutors acted after a 15-month investigation into allegations made by a former ELSTAT board member. If found guilty, Georgiou faces five to 10 years in prison.At stake in the ELSTAT case is more than the credibility of a senior statistician, one who previously worked for 20 years at the International Monetary Fund. The entire bailout of Greece was based on the numbers provided by ELSTAT on the deficit figures for 2009 onwards. Any deal with the troika might unravel were the foundation of the agreement to be suddenly altered.”

You couldn't make this up. Guess who is delighted over the troubles Georgiou finds himself in:

“There is also no love lost between Georgiou and ELSTAT employees, with the union representing those workers having waged war against him almost from the start. It is telling that the union greeted the prosecution announcement with hardly concealed joy. "There is a moral obligation to remove ELSTAT's chairman until there is a final ruling," the union said. "It is beyond belief that ELSTAT should be led by a man of our creditors."  Many say the charges against Georgiou are over the top, if not outright fabricated. Miranda Xafa, CEO of E.F. Consulting and a former member of the IMF executive board, told SPIEGEL ONLINE that "the investigation is motivated by a desire to blame the Greek debt crisis on external factors, such as speculators, bankers or austerity imposed by (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel and the IMF. Instead of investigating whether the Greek government understated the deficit before the crisis, they are investigating whether it overstated the deficit after the crisis!"

[…]

Georgiou is painted by his critics almost as a traitor. According to ELSTAT unionists, "the national statistics agency is an indivisible part of our country's national sovereignty." Georgiou says he has heard the accusation before. And his response is always the same: "There is only one way to serve the public interest," he says. "By sticking to the truth."

The Greek state employee unions are a hodge-podge of Marxists and other far-left creeds, and have been and probably remain deeply involved in the corruption present at all levels of the Greek State. It is no surprise that they would attack the messenger telling the the truth about Greece's debts – after all, they too are seeing their sinecures threatened by the austerity regime creditors have imposed. An honest and incorruptible head of an administrative department in Greece is automatically their enemy.

In any event, it is quite in character that those who told the lies that enabled the country to attain euro membership remain completely safe from the law, while someone trying to rectify the situation and attempting to restore the tattered reputation of Greece's statistics department is treated like a criminal.