The Troika’s Policy in Greece: Rob the Greek people and give the money to private banks, the ECB, the IMF and the dominant States of the Eurozone
On
20 August 2018, the Greek government of Alexis Tsipras, the IMF and
the European leaders celebrated the end of the Third Memorandum.
On
this occasion, the major media and those in power spread the
following message: Greece has regained its freedom, its economy is
improving, unemployment is on the decline, Europe has lent Greece 300
billion and the Greeks will have to start repaying that debt in 2022
or in 2032.
The
main claims are completely unfounded as Greece remains under the
control of its creditors. In compliance with the accords that the
Alexis Tsipras government signed, the country must imperatively
achieve a primary budgetary surplus of 3.5% which will force it to
continue brutal policies of reduction of public spending in the
social sector and in investment. Contrary to the dominant message
that Greece will not begin to repay its debt until some time in the
future, it should be clearly understood that Greece has been repaying
considerable amounts constantly all along to the ECB, the IMF and to
private creditors, and this prevents it from responding to the needs
of its population.
by
Eric Toussaint
Part
8 - The doctored statistics helped to vindicate the Troika’s
intervention
The
Preliminary Report of the Truth Committee on Greece’s Debt as made
public at the Greek Parliament in June 2015 irrefutably showed that
Papandreou, the senior executives in the Greek Institute for
Statistics and the European leaders had fabricated a misleading
version of the Greek crisis so as to blame public expenditure and
exonerate the Greek and foreign private banks (that had tried to
maximize their profits by using to the hilt all the possibilities
that had opened with Greece entering the Eurozone).
As
reported in an article in the French daily Le Monde (from an AFP
release): “In 2009, the revelation by Socialist PM George
Papandreou that the Greek public deficit actually amounted to 12.7%
of the GDP, and not 6%, as claimed by his conservative predecessor,
had hurled the country into a financial whirlwind.”
Statistics
on the public debt and on the extent of the public deficit were
doctored so as to vindicate the ensuing austerity measures, the
Troika’s intervention and the signature of the first Memorandum of
Agreement (see Chapter II of the Report, p. 17
http://www.cadtm.org/IMG/pdf/Report.pdf).
On 9
June 2018, the Greek Supreme Court ratified the sentencing of Andreas
Georgiou, head of the Greek Statistics Agency ELSTAT from August 2010
to August 2015, to two years’ suspended imprisonment for the
offence of failing to fulfil his obligations as President of ELSTAT.
We can
also read in Le Monde: “This former member of the
International Monetary Fund was suspected of having reached an
official agreement with Eurostat (the European Statistics Agency,
which is dependent on the Commission) in order to increase Greece’s
deficit and debt figures for the year 2009. It is assumed that the
objective was to facilitate the financial supervision of the country,
with the launch, in 2010, of the first international aid plan for
Greece (…)”.
The
responsibility of European leaders in those manipulations is
evidenced by the many ways in which they attempted to prevent the
Greek justice system from sentencing Andreas Georgiou. As mentioned
in Le Monde: in 2016, Andreas Georgiou had been publicly defended by
Marianne Thyssen, European Commissioner for Social Affairs, who
claimed that the data on the Greek debt from 2010 to 2015 were timely
and reliable. Over the last three years there have been dozens of
statements by European leaders and senior officials at their service
putting pressure on the Greek judiciary to close the case.
In fact,
Andreas Georgiou was the direct accomplice of European leaders,
Papandreou, the IMF, foreign bankers and their Greek counterparts. It
does not take a conspiracy theorist to find that in this case there
was a Machiavellian conspiracy.
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