New Europe — Athens Misdemeanors’ Appeal Court court has found that Andreas Georgiou, the country’s former statistics chief has breached his duties after he failed to resign his International Monetary Fund post he held for 21 years before he joined Greece’ official statistics service ELSTAT.
The Athens prosecutor also recommended that Georgiou should face charges, as he failed to consult ELSTAT’s resulting in the decision on the revised 2009 deficit figures being taken without the agreement of the other members, handing him a suspended jail sentence of two years, after Greece’s Supreme Court Prosecutor Xeni Dimitriou ordered the reopening of a case earlier this month.
In 2013, a prosecutor brought felony charges against Georgiou and two other agency employees, accusing them of falsifying 2009 fiscal data. A former ELSTAT employee had claimed that Georgiou had inflated the deficit numbers to justify austerity measures.
The case was dismissed in 2015.
The two-year suspended sentence was handed to Georgiou for failing to hold regular monthly board meetings to keep board members informed of his decisions. Georgiou halted the monthly meetings after a police investigation revealed that his work computer had been hacked by ELSTAT’s deputy chairman and his emails shared with other board members.
A spokeswoman for the European Commission’s Financial issues Annika Breidthardt noted that the recent court judgment that got published on Tuesday, was “not in line” with Mr. Georgiou’s previous acquittal on the same charges. “The independence of statistical offices in our member states is a key pillar the proper functioning of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), this is why it is protected by EU law. We take note of the specific ruling which we note that is not in line with the previous ruling in the previous procedure. We understand that today’s ruling is open for appealing on legal grounds before the Greek Supreme Court. We have full confidence in the reliability and accuracy of ELSTAT data during 2010-2015 and beyond,” said the EU executive spokeswoman.
“We underlined the importance of the independence of ELSTAT as a key commitment under the terms of the Memorandum of Understanding of the Program,” concluded Breidthardt. The European Commission, along with Greece’s creditors have tried to persuade the SYRIZA-AnEl government that the years-long prosecutions Georgiou risk undermining the political independence of Greek statistics.
The newspaper Real News quoted former Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis (New Democracy) in 2016 saying that the prosecutor’s charge “finally opens the way to deal with the case. Let there be light.”
Karamanlis served as Greek premier from 2004 to 2009 and allegedly believes that fiscal numbers were not “so bad” to merit receiving external financial aid.
George Papandreou, (PM 2009 – 2011), whose government appointed Andreou as head of ELSTAT in 2010, asked for international aid to avoid Greece’s bankruptcy. Papandreou also had blamed Karamanlis for hiding a huge deficit.
In a statement after the court’s decision, Papandreou stressed that Greece’s statistics had been systematically manipulated until September 2009 by Karamanlis’ government, resulting in the 2010 debt crisis.
“This happened long before the establishment of an independent Elstat in 2010” Papandreou noted.
