Greek
journalists attended seminars funded by the International Monetary
Fund in order to present its positions favorably, said Greece’s
former representative to the IMF Panagiotis Roumeliotis.
Roumeliotis
testified on Tuesday in front of the special parliamentary committee
on the Greek debt. The former official said that several Greek
journalists were “trained” in Washington D.C. in order to support
the positions of the IMF and the European Commission in Greek media.
Roumeliotis
said that when he was in D.C. he accidentally met with Greek
journalists who told him that they were invited to attend seminars on
the function of the IMF. He further said that the committee can ask
the organization’s Director of Communications Department, Gerry
Rice, for a list of journalists’ names who attended the seminars.
Greek
Parliament President Zoe Konstantopoulou, who heads the committee,
adopted the proposal and appointed a committee member to draft a
formal request to the IMF. “In Greece, certain individuals who work
for the mass media were contracted to conceal the fact that the Greek
debt was not sustainable.”
Konstantopoulou
went further and named television journalist Yiannis Pretenteris who,
according to Konstantopoulou, has admitted in his book that he
attended the IMF seminars.
Roumeliotis
claimed that many journalists were victims of misinformation and the
omission of the fact that the debt was not sustainable was
detrimental to the public interest. He further said that several
economists and university professors attempted to convince the public
that the debt was sustainable, adding that he puts them in the same
category as the journalists.
Source:
We should
remember that Roumeliotis told to NY Times, three years ago, that the
IMF knew that the program for Greece was impossible to implement
because there was nowhere a successful example
(fa.ev/imf-new-tactics-it-is-better-to-appear).
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