Venizelos rejects blame for name list
Socialist PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos on Thursday sought to
absolve himself of responsibility for the failure of authorities to
probe a list of some 2,000 Greek tax evasion suspects, given to
authorities two years ago by former French Finance Minister Christine
Lagarde, as former minister Yiannis Ragousis quit the party, casting
aspersions on Venizelos’s role in the affair.
Speaking to Mega TV
on Wednesday night, Venizelos defended his actions during his stint as
finance minister, saying his efforts had focused on “saving the country”
not on “controlling secret information.” Venizelos, who on Tuesday gave
authorities a memory stick containing the list of names after Finance
Minister Yannis Stournaras admitted the data had gone astray, also hit
out at the leftist opposition SYRIZA party after it declared that “the
country went to elections while Venizelos kept the data in his drawer.”
Venizelos
said the affair should be discussed by Parliament’s transparency
committee, which on Wednesday heard from former Financial Crimes Squad
(SDOE) chief Yiannis Diotis. In his testimony, Diotis claimed to have
been given the list of names “informally” by former Finance Minister
Giorgos Papaconstantinou, but said the information could not be used as
it was not a legitimate document.
Earlier in the day, Ragousis
quit PASOK, citing inaction over the list which, he said, demonstrated
the authorities’ “decisiveness to not strike at tax evasion with the
same severity reserved for onslaughts on income and imposing new taxes.”
Ragousis said PASOK was “a party where the views and practices of the
political establishment set up after the fall of the military
dictatorship have prevailed.” His departure came as another ex-PASOK
minister, Andreas Loverdos, suggested he would launch his own party
soon. |
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