EC Meeting March 2017

They also send help parcels to the islands who are dealing with the refugees so they can clean themselves. We were told that most refugees want to leave Greece because of the financial problems they are facing and the fact Greece can’t bear the numbers that are arriving, but Germany wants Greece to keep the refugees as no one else wants to take responsibility for them The volunteers we spoke to had been doing the work for over three years and could not see them stopping any time soon. The project now needs over 200 regular volunteers to keep up with the demand from the refugees as word of mouth around Pireaus and especially down at the port where many refugees are arriving is meaning more and more people are using the services. Zoe is a human rights lawyer and politician of the political party Syriza being elected as an MP in 2012 and 2015. She was formally the speaker of the Hellenic Parliament. From the outset it was apparent that Zoe wanted us to have an accurate and clear view of what was happening in Greece as she was well aware that what is reported in our press is not an accurate picture of what is and has been going on Before she was elected as the speaker for the parliament her role was in “Corruption and Transparency”. Her main aim was to audit the debt crisis to get the truth about what had occurred. A committee was then formed in April after she became the speaker and had the power to deal with it by gaining proper access to the debt books of Greece. The committee consisted of representatives from several different countries and an expert from the UN on Debt and Human Rights. It was not an easy process people thought that as they had voted Zoe in they would get leniency on corruption but it wasn’t the case and Zoe had a very turbulent and difficult 6 months trying to collect evidence for the committee. They found it particularly difficult to get feedback from the Greek banks, they were reluctant to give figures and invoked the banking secrecy clause rather than give up any information! Zoe Konstantopoulou Corruption and Transparency

Preliminary Report:

The Truth Committee on Public Debt

After a 4 month period of negotiating, a preliminary report was published in June 2015. There was an aspiration to look into the rest of the auditing and show exactly how the debt was created ( Doug has a copy)

Conclusion 1

Essentially they disproved the public myth that Greece got their point of crisis by living beyond its means. The investigation showed that actually public spending was below average in Europe, defence spending however was over the European average. Here they see the most corruption – tanks without bullets, submarines without torpedoes and defective armour - high profit for corrupt officials but useless to the state

Conclusion 2

Since 2010 the IMF had knowledge that the Greek debt was unsustainable. With this knowledge they should not have been able to lend and so that is why they concealed the fact that they knew. They denied they had copies of the files that showed this. The problem here was not about the freedom of information but the lack of institutionalised transparency.

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