Greek prosecutors have said they want to conduct a criminal inquiry into whether Andreas Georgiou, the head of the country’s statistics agency ELSTAT, and two of his subordinates to determine whether they manipulated numbers to force the country to seek international aid.
Georgiou, who spent nearly two decades at the International Monetary Fund, one of Greece’s Troika of lenders along with the European Union and European Central Bank, was first accused in 2011 by a former agency employee, Zoe Georganta, who claimed Georgiou had inflated the agency’s official figure for Greece’s 2009 budget deficit to to more than 15 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product.
That led then-Prime Minister George Papandreou to call on the IMF for a bailout, setting in motion nearly three years of imposed austerity measures that have wracked Greek society and nearly upended the Eurozone. Georgiou was first questioned a year ago by prosecutors after Georganta claimed the real deficit figure was 12.4 percent and that he had changed it.
The New York Times reported that prosecutors may also want to question Papandreou, who is a sitting Member of Parliament while he’s teaching at Harvard, and former finance minister George Papaconstantinou, who’s already under investigation into whether he removed the names of three of his relatives from a list of Greeks with secret Swiss bank accounts that haven’t been checked for tax evasion.
A parliamentary committee last year found no wrongdoing by the politicians, vaguely highlighting instead “a lack of institutional knowledge of the Eurozone” and absolved everyone of everything.
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