Greek Domestic Political Fallout
New Democracy's government accused Costas Simitis and PASOK, who was the prime minister and president of PASOK at that time, of having falsified Greece's macroeconomic statistics, on the basis of which the European institutions accepted Greece to join the Eurozone. All the opposition parties accused New Democracy's government on making an audit that was not a real one.
PASOK said that it never falsified any data, and that New Democracy's government just changed the way costs (mostly military expenses) were accounted for through the years and some other accounting techniques, and that the way PASOK used to do it was known to the Eurostat and Eurostat was never opposed to it.
Costas Simitis wrote in an article in the Financial Times claiming that Greece's deficit revision damaged Europe. There Simitis states among other things that The Commission must design an auditing system that is the same for all EU countries and guarantees objectivity and impartiality, while ruling out domestic political interference. Some days later FT received a comment by the Director General of Eurostat.
Recently, (March 2006) Eurostat has made changes to the system of defense expenditure calculation, which seemed to legitimize some of the practices of the previous Costas Simitis government of PASOK. This caused criticism of the Financial Audit of 2004 and the New Democracy government by PASOK and parts of the press. New Democracy responded that the defense expenditures covered by the 2006 changes constituted only a small part of much more substantial expenditures that were fraudulently concealed by the previous PASOK government.
Read more about this topic: Greek Financial Audit, 2004
Famous quotes containing the words greek, domestic and/or political:
“With astonishment Aschenbach noticed that the boy was entirely beautiful. His countenance, pale and gracefully reserved, was surrounded by ringlets of honey-colored hair, and with its straight nose, its enchanting mouth, its expression of sweet and divine gravity, it recalled Greek sculpture of the noblest period.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The most domestic cat, which has lain on a rug all her days, appears quite at home in the woods, and, by her sly and stealthy behavior, proves herself more native there than the regular inhabitants.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Genocide begins, however improbably, in the conviction that classes of biological distinction indisputably sanction social and political discrimination.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)