Journalism in Greece: "Is that a crime?"

(Background of Lagard list and Mr. Vaxevanis:

On 28 October 2012, Greek reporter and editor Kostas Vaxevanis claimed to be in possession of the Lagarde list and published a document with 2,056 names in his magazine Hot Doc. The next day he was arrested for breaching privacy laws with possible sentences of up to two years in prison. Three days later in trial Vaxevanis was found not guilty. On 26 October 2012, the Greek magazine Zouyka apparently pre-empted the publication of the HOT DOC release of the "Lagarde List" by publishing scanned pages of HOT DOC magazine's Greek Lagarde List in full.)

Kostas Vaxevanis: Greek justice and freedom of the press exist in name only

Πηγή: Xindex
By Kostas Vaxevanis / 20 April 2015

Criminal defamation continues to be an issue that individual governments across Europe must address. The prosecution of investigative journalists, who base their reporting on official documents as we saw in Greece, will have a detrimental effect on media freedom, the right of free expression and the public interest. Index calls on Greece -- and all European Union member states where it remains in penal codes -- to urgently reform domestic law to take defamation out of the criminal sphere.

The justice system of Greece is often compared to a very thin fishing net, which catches the small fish, but which allows the bigger, stronger fish to break free.

It is a widely-held belief in Greece that there is a lack of justice administered by the country’s judicial system, and this belief is confirmed if one looks at recent history.

None of the major scandals of recent years — ranging from that of the Athens Stock Exchange to the scandal involving judges who conspired in the rigging of court cases — resulted in any guilty verdicts.

A few days ago, the Greek justice system sentenced former finance minister Giorgos Papakonstantinou to a mere 12 months’ imprisonment for his removal of names from the so-called Lagarde List of alleged Greek tax evaders with Swiss bank accounts, while he was not convicted for the most serious charges against him, namely, his inaction with regard to the individuals named on the list. However, this paradoxical situation, in which the Greek justice system charged and attempted to prosecute me on two occasions over the publication of the Lagarde List but did not sentence the government minister who concealed it, does not stop here. At the same time that a Greek court issued a paltry 12 month prison sentence to Papakonstantinou, a different court sentenced me to a 26 month suspended sentence, following charges that were filed against me by one of Greece’s major oligarchs, businessman Andreas Vgenopoulos.

Investigative reports which were publicised in the magazine which I publish, Hot Doc, revealed that Andreas Vgenopoulos had purchased the Cyprus-based Marfin Bank, which he then utilized in order to provide capitalization to other business interests of his and to those of his fellow oligarchs. According to the Cypriot government, Vgenpoulos’ actions with Marfin Bank was one of the main factors which resulted in the collapse of the country’s economy.

All of the reports which were published in Hot Doc were derived form official documents from the parliament of Cyprus, from Cypriot prosecutors, from Greek courts, and from the central banks of Greece and Cyprus. On the basis of documentation, anti-corruption prosecutors were obliged to launch an investigation regarding the financial activities of Vgenopoulos.

Even though this investigation is still in progress, along with a parallel investigation being conducted by Cypriot authorities, who have also issued a warrant for the freezing of Vgenopoulos’ assets totaling €2.4 billion, I was tried and sentenced by a Greek court on charges of libel. In court, I provided documentation from the vice prosecutor of the Greek Court of Appeals, who was requesting that Greek authorities investigate Vgenopoulos on allegations of bribery and money laundering based on evidence held by Cypriot authorities. Despite this, I was found guilty and issued a sentence that is greater than that issued by the Greek judicial system to a former Greek government minister, Giorgos Papakonstantinou.

In contrast to the standards of European law and European court decisions, which have made it clear that journalists are obligated to maintain a critical stance and, often, a strong and aggressive tone towards public figures, the Greek court which tried me concocted “malicious intent” on my part. Indeed, it is notable that the prosecutor, who was the same individual which had requested that I be sentenced for my revelation of the Lagarde List, on the basis of an unprecedented assertion: that I am “a very good journalist”, which means that my actions were undertaken “with malicious intent, and not out of ignorance”. This is unprecedented in global legal history.

Following my sentencing, numerous international organizations and actors responded, including the OSCE and the International Federation of Journalists, but once again, the only reaction in Greece was a guilty silence. At the present time, I am personally facing, along with Hot Doc magazine, no less than 42 different criminal cases and lawsuits. These are charges filed by politicians and oligarchs, whom we have investigated as part of our journalistic responsibilities. None of these individuals have officially responded to any of our revelations, as public figures are obliged to do.

Instead, they have resorted to legal means while attempting to influence public opinion by saying that they “will punish the slanderer in court”. In this way, they avoid responding to the revelations made against them and employ the justice system in their favour, to hold journalists hostage. It should be noted that Hot Doc’s legal bills for all of these different cases have surpassed €100,000.

The ultimate aim of this coordinated effort of charges and lawsuits against me and my magazine is to force us to reach a settlement, or to otherwise lead to our economic obliteration. It is rare for a journalist to challenge a coordinated and corrupt system, which also holds influence over specific individuals within the legal system, who then hold the power to issue specific sentences and decisions upon request.

Meanwhile, freedom of the press is rapidly being transformed into an altar upon which everyone pretends to worship, but which contains many skeletons within.

Unfortunately, the same is true of justice in Greece as well, resulting in a system where even honest justices often operate in fear of displeasing a government minister or major business figure, who has the power to file charges against them and destroy them.

When former defense minister Akis Tsohatzopoulos was arrested, his personal effects included notes on coordinated actions he would undertake with business figures, in order to destroy prosecutors who were continuing investigations against him. The justice system, in turn, did not have the courage to further examine this and to investigate those who plotting to kill their fellow prosecutors, instead allowing these crucial pieces of evidence to get “lost” in the mountains of paperwork relating to this case.

In this most blatant of manners, judges and prosecutors who depart from the judicial branch in Greece later become legal consultants to the same business figures which, until recently, they held a responsibility to investigate and prosecute. And this convoluted web of corruption and injustice is veiled behind a legal system which issues harsh punishments for charges such as that of libel. This legal system arrests and prosecutes “slanderers”, but, God forbid, never any major fraudsters or corrupt politicians. The very concept of an independent judiciary is devalued on a daily basis in Greece, in the eyes of justice and common sense. If one asks judicial professionals to tell you about justice, they can refer you to a whole range of laws, but to far fewer instances of true justice being served or public figures having been imprisoned.





Πηγή: Greek News
27 Feb 2014

Athens District Attorney’s has indicted 6 people, including a member of the Greek Secret Service (EYP) and two who allegedly were collaborating with the National Intelligence Service (ΕΥP), for creating a group in order to assassinate journalist Kostas Vaxevanis, publisher of HOT DOC magazine

On the 9th September 2012, a few days before the journalist published the Lagarde List, 5 people ambushed him inside his house. Kostas Vaxevanis became aware of their presence and called the police. After a thorough investigation, done mostly by the editorial team of HOT DOC, the police was led to the 6 people mentioned above, who had organized not only this particular operation, but many others as well.

The journalist had claimed from the first moment that this was a group hired by the bankers against whom disclosures have been made. The same group used anonymous blogs to slander journalists Stephen Grey (Reuters) and Thomas Landon Jr. (New York Times), who both had published stories regarding scandals and corruption inside the Greek banking system.

In October 2012, Vaxevanis’ news magazine, Hot Doc, published a list of 2,059 Greek residents with accounts at the Geneva branch of HSBC. He said that he had verified the authenticity of the list, which was delivered anonymously to the magazine on a flash drive, by calling up a tenth of the people on it and asking them to confirm that they had an account with HSBC. He said they have also verified the balance of their accounts as those appeared on a particular date on the list. Hot Doc published only names of the account holders and their stated profession. It did not disclose the amount of money they were holding in the bank.

Public prosecutor brought Vaxevanis into trial and he was acquitted. The prosecutor’s office appealed the decision. At his retrial in December an Athens court has acquitted again Kostas Vaxevanis on charges of breaking privacy laws by publishing the “Lagarde List”.

In his defence, the accused had told the court that he had published the list in order “to expose the system of corruption that is oppressing the country and which is on that list”.

Πηγή: The Irate Greek
18 April 2013

The following is a summary of pages 14-41 of the 26th issue of the magazine HotDoc, whose editor is journalist Kostas Vaxevanis.

The 3rd issue of the magazine HotDoc, dated 24 May 2012, revealed sensitive information about scandals involving Greek banks. Advance copies had been sent to other news outlets. On 23 May, Fimotro, a blog often denounced for engaging in defamation and blackmail, published a picture of a receipt allegedly issued by the Greek Intelligence Service (EYP) in the name of HotDoc’s editor, Kostas Vaxevanis. The receipt was dated 15 June 2011 and said he was paid €50,000 for services to EYP for the 1st semester of 2011. Fimotro, as well as other blogs which circulated this picture of the receipt, also played a role in portraying Reuters’ Steven Grey, who was researching a similar story on Greek banks, as an “agent” of unknown forces who sought to ruin the Greek economy (Reuters published at the time a long pieceon the surveillance Grey was subjected to).

The HotDoc team denounced the receipt as a forgery and Vaxevanis tried to sue Giannis Papagiannis, the administrator of Fimotro, whose name is known to the public following a previous court case in which he was accused of blackmail. Strangely, the prosecutor office refused the documents of the previous case file as proof of his identity, and, because Papagiannis could not be charged with a felony in the HotDoc case, Google refused to provide his personal data. The case against Papagiannis was thus dropped, despite abundant online evidence of his identity, including, recently, blog posts signed with his full name.

Then the HotDoc team started receiving barely veiled threats through friends and acquaintances, while living under the constant impression that they were being followed. The magazine however continued to conduct research on banks. In July 2012, it published a first set of findings showing that a team of EYP perjurers, who had been exposed for illegal activities by the HotDoc journalists in the past, was trying to eliminate them in collaboration with big businessmen and bankers.

On 8 September, Vaxevanis was returning home late at night in a friend’s car when they noticed two vehicles parked strangely in the street with their headlights on. He avoided the cars and entered his house through the back door, unnoticed. Early the next morning, on 9 September, he heard his dog bark. He got up and saw in the garden a man hiding behind the gate, as if waiting for him to come home. He called the police, whose arrival in the street scared the presumed assailants away – it turned out that there were at least 4 of them – but they managed to escape, as the operations centre had given the patrol car a wrong house number. When State Security agents came later during the day to take Vaxevanis’s deposition, the commanding officer dismissed the whole case as a botched burglary attempt. Vaxevanis reported to the police observations made by himself and by neighbours about people loitering in the neighbourhood, but was never asked to give the witnesses’ names. Neither was he offered police protection, which many prominent journalists enjoy in Greece. The media also ignored the issue, while some people in media circles started whispering that Vaxevanis was merely an attention whore.

On 17 September, a woman named Maria contacted HotDoc and asked to meet Vaxevanis, saying that it was a matter of life and death and that “his life is at risk, it’s the bankers”. She claimed that guns-for-hire from FYROM had been contracted by a banker and ordered to kill Vaxevanis, that she herself had forged the EYP receipt in his name, that the same gang was contracted to defame journalist Tasos Telloglou, who was also publishing reports critical of the same banker, and, most importantly, that they were to break into the offices of Reuters journalist to steal evidence of a serious bank scandal. HotDoc knew that such a break-in had already happened on 30 May in the offices of Reuters’ Nikos Leontopoulos, but the event had never been made public. For Maria to know this, she must have been involved somehow, and HotDoc decided that Maria’s “confession” was worth investigating.

Maria revealed that she had been hired by a company run by a number of individuals employed by EYP. She was asked as part of her duties to prepare forged receipts in the name of Vaxevanis, other journalists and a politician from Independent Greeks, all in the name of the “national interest”. The targets had in common that they were investigating scandals involving the banker who hired the company or the illegal activities of the company owner himself. The receipts were then sent not only to “friendly” newspapers and to a publishing company in greater Athens, but also to the offices of New Democracy, where a party official showed the Vaxevanis receipt to a foreign journalist who was interviewing him about the Lagarde list and Vaxevanis’s arrest.

After defamation-by-receipt failed, the EYP gang, according to Maria, launched three parallel operations. The first aimed at defaming Tasos Telloglou, the second at eliminating – physically – Vaxevanis, and the third at discrediting the key witness in a lawsuit against the same banker who was targeting Vaxevanis, by planting drugs in her restaurants and framing her for drug trafficking. After the ambush at Vaxevanis’s house on 9 September, Maria had understood what the “contract” she heard mentioned in conversations was about and freaked out, realizing that, after Vaxevanis was killed, she would likely be next. She tried to pull out under various pretexts, but, since that was not possible, she chose to meet with Vaxevanis and tell him the whole truth. The HotDoc team asked her to keep her position in the EYP gang so that they could conduct their investigation safely.

From there on, Vaxevanis first met with a notary to give a statement about the whole story, in a document that was to be unsealed and published only in case of his death or with his explicit order. He then informed Tasos Telloglou that he was being targeted too. Then, the HotDoc team took handwritten notes handed over by Maria to an expert graphologist, Ioannis Makris, who was formerly the deputy head of the Hellenic Police Directorate for Criminal Investigations. Makris was able to determine that the author of the handwritten notes was most likely the same person as the one who had forged the EYP receipt. In December 2012, Makris met with Maria at the HotDoc offices to take handwriting samples from her. After examining the samples in detail, Makris concluded beyond any doubt that Maria was the author of the receipt, while the signature on the receipt was obviously not that of Vaxevanis.

The HotDoc team was further able to confirm Maria’s statements by visiting the premises used by the EYP gang to monitor the magazine, where they found hidden crypts behind ventilation shafts as she had described. Meanwhile, Maria played her role and was pretending to run the operation targeting the witness in the court case against the banker. She gave documents and surveillance photographs about this operation to the HotDoc team, which was able once again to cross-check the information. Having collected sufficient evidence that Maria’s story was well-founded, the HotDoc team took their case to the judiciary. HotDoc was also provided a CD with recorded phone conversations between members of the gang, in which they discuss details of their operations and name the banker behind the story (for safety reasons, the CD has been given for safekeeping to colleagues abroad.)

In early December 2012, HotDoc was contacted by one, then two, other members of the gang, in what seems to have been an attempt at laying the blame for the whole operation on the rest of its members. After two meetings, HotDoc chose not pursue the contact any further.

The magazine also notes that verbal attacks against Vaxevanis have been scaled up in political circles, quoting the minutes of a session of the parliamentary investigation committee on the Lagarde list, in which PASOK’s leader Evangelos Venizelos, instead of discussing his own role in matter, insinuates that a rival banker is secretly funding HotDoc and that “the Service” (hinting at EYP) should be able to prove it.

The 26th issue of HotDoc includes a thorough article on the above, as well as a long interview with Maria in which she narrates the story in detail, a list of the individuals involved in the EYP gang (initials only) and extensive documentation, including photographs, from the magazine’s investigation file.

Press freedom is defined by the surrounding climate. In Greece, this is a climate of corruption.

Πηγή: PressGazette
By Kostas Vaxevanis
June 26 2013

The editor facing trial for breaching Greek privacy laws speaks out about the state of press freedom in his country/

There’s quite some irony in the fact that events developing in Greece these past years, during the crisis and in the name of the crisis, are taking place in the country that gave birth to democracy. The coalition government is using the argument that the country is in a state of emergency to push through laws serving specific interest groups while constantly weakening the function of Parliament.

The government’s first victim is the press. Greece has witnessed the development of a system of private media that serves entwined political and corporate interests. In recent years, media corporations have been living on money given to them through scandalous loans from banks (which will, however, not give loans to healthy, productive businesses) and through the selective provision of advertisements. The fate and survival of media groups is thus inextricably linked to banks and related government policies.

Major scandals involving Greek banks, which were revealed by Reuters and The New York Times, were covered up by Greek media.

The Greek press turns out every day to be an organ of propaganda and vested interests. Its “good” behaviour is rewarded with State-sponsored ads, bank-sponsored ads and loans given without collateral. A newspaper selling 300 copies a day would absorb a yearly €1.5m in advertisements a few years ago – more than the advertising revenue of the country’s most circulated paper.

And of course, independent journalism is being punished. Uncovering the Lagarde list in the magazine I edit, HOT DOC, caused me to be immediately prosecuted. Even after I was found innocent, the Public Prosecutor annulled the court decision and ordered a re-trial. On 10 June, as the re-trial was due to begin, two of my lawyers and two of my witnesses could not be present for reasons beyond their control. The court insisted however that the trial not be deferred. In another room of the same building, the trial of a Golden Dawn member who is charged with attempted manslaughter against an immigrant was postponed for the eighth time.

The political system tries every day to pass off HOT DOC as a magazine that serves political purposes and is funded by either mysterious or specific donors. A rogue team of secret agents tried to eliminate me physically. The magazine revealed the details of this plan, with documents and interviews with some of the people involved. The Greek media didn’t write a single word about it.

Press freedom is defined by the surrounding climate. In Greece, this is a climate of corruption. The economic and financial establishment is doing whatever it wants in the country, while the political system not only turns a blind eye but even passes laws to protect illegal business activities. And the media, who participate actively in this framework of corruption, silence it all.

The result is that Greeks do not know what is happening in their own country. The media are presenting the difficult days of the crisis as the only way to go, and this government as the only government that can manage it. The dirty money of corrupt business tycoons is transferred to the coffers of political parties, and no one is punished. A special law on liability of ministers, that was passed by PASOK chairman Evangelos Venizelos, enables total impunity.

As I write these lines, HOT DOC is revealing that 214 indictment bills forwarded by the Public Prosecutor’s office to Parliament about likely illegal activities of ministers are being shelved until they fall under the statute of limitations. In this context, the fact that Greece is ranked 84th in terms of press freedom worldwide, behind dictatorial countries in Africa, is merely a statistical detail.

Greece’s Rotten Oligarchy

Πηγή: New York Times
By KOSTAS VAXEVANIS
Jan 6 2013

DEMOCRACY is like a bicycle: if you don’t keep pedaling, you fall. Unfortunately, the bicycle of Greek democracy has long been broken. After the military junta collapsed in 1974, Greece created only a hybrid, diluted form of democracy. You can vote, belong to a party and protest. In essence, however, a small clique exercises all meaningful political power.

For all that has been said about the Greek crisis, much has been left unsaid. The crisis has become a battleground of interests and ideologies. At stake is the role of the public sector and the welfare state. Yes, in Greece we have a dysfunctional public sector; for the past 40 years the ruling parties handed out government jobs to their supporters, regardless of their qualifications.

But the real problem with the public sector is the tiny elite of business people who live off the Greek state while passing themselves off as “entrepreneurs.” They bribe politicians to get fat government contracts, usually at inflated prices. They also own many of the country’s media outlets, and thus manage to ensure that their actions are clothed in silence. Sometimes they’ll even buy a soccer team in order to drum up popular support and shield their crimes behind popular protection, as the drug lord Pablo Escobar did in Colombia, and as the paramilitary leader Arkan did in Serbia.

In 2011, Evangelos Venizelos, who was then the finance minister and is now the leader of the socialist party, Pasok, instituted a new property-tax law. But for properties larger than 2,000 square meters — about 21,000 square feet — the tax was reduced by 60 percent. Mr. Venizelos thus carved out a big exemption for the only people who could afford to pay the tax: the rich. (Mr. Venizelos is also the man responsible for a law granting broad immunity to government ministers.)

Such shenanigans have gone on for decades. The public is deprived of real information, as television stations, newspapers and online news sites are controlled by the economic and political elite.

Another scandal involves the so-called Lagarde List. In 2010, Christine Lagarde, then the French finance minister (and now the head of the International Monetary Fund), gave the Greek government a list of roughly 2,000 Greek citizens with Swiss bank accounts, to help uncover tax fraud. Greek officials did virtually nothing with the list; two former finance ministers, George Papaconstantinou and his successor, Mr. Venizelos, reportedly even told Parliament they did not know where it was. Meanwhile, several media outlets falsely accused some politicians and business figures of being on the list in order to conceal the ugly reality: rich people were evading taxes while their desperate fellow citizens were searching the trash for food.

When Hot Doc, the monthly magazine I edit and publish, made the list public in October,I was arrested and charged with violating personal privacy, but was acquitted. The result didn’t please those in power. So I am being brought back for a second trial (a date has yet to be set) on similarly vague allegations. Throughout the entire process — the publication of the list, my arrest, my acquittal — the Greek media were absent. The case was a top story in the international press, but not in the country where it took place.

The reason is simple. The Lagarde list implicates a corrupt group that answers to the name of democracy even as it casually nullifies it: officials with offshore companies, friends and relatives of government ministers, bankers, publishers and those involved in the black market.

After my magazine released the list, the Greek government made not a single statement about the case.

When Mr. Venizelos left the Finance Ministry last March, he failed to turn the CD with the list over to his successor. He took it with him. Only when his successor, Yannis Stournaras, told The Financial Times in October that he had never received the list did Mr. Venizelos turn it over to the prime minister’s office. He was never asked about the delay, and leaders of the three parties in the coalition government have not referred his conduct to Parliament’s investigatory committee.

Meanwhile, a newly released version of the list made clear that someone had removed the names of three relatives of Mr. Papaconstantinou, who was the finance minister from 2009 to 2011, before Mr. Venizelos. Last month, Mr. Papaconstantinou was expelled from Pasok. He now faces a Parliamentary investigation, the potential lifting of his immunity from prosecution as a former minister, and charges of tampering with the data. It appears that he may become a new Iphigenia, a scapegoat sacrificed so that the corrupt political system can survive.

This is all unfolding at a time when Greece is walking a tightrope above the abyss of bankruptcy, while the coalition government is instituting new taxes on the lower classes. Half of young Greeks are unemployed. The economy is shrinking at an annual rate of 6.9 percent. People are scrounging for food. And a neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, is on the rise, exploiting the resentment and rage toward the ruling class.

The Greek people must remount their bicycle of democracy by demanding an end to deception and corruption. Journalists need to resist manipulation and rediscover their journalistic duties. And the government should revive Greece’s ancient democratic heritage — instead of killing the messenger.

Kostas Vaxevanis is a magazine publisher and television journalist. This essay was translated by Karen Emmerich from the Greek.

Greece flirts with tyranny and Europe looks away

Kostas Vaxevanis speaks to journalists as he awaits the beginning of his trial in Athens.

Πηγή: Guardian
By Nick Cohen
Nov 3 2012

When those madcap Scandinavian satirists awarded the Nobel peace prize to the European Union, they let everyone in on the joke by praising its commitment to "reconciliation, democracy and human rights". If the committee's 2012 citation were anything other than a spoof, you would have read denunciations of the rise of oppressive state power and neo-Nazism in Greece from concerned Euro commissioners long before now.

The EU denounces threats to freedom of speech in Viktor Orbán's Hungary with vigour. European politicians worry with good reason about the fate of independent institutions that stand in the way of the rabble-rousing regime. They notice the fascistic element in the new Hungarian right's flirtations with antisemitic and anti-Roma hatreds and its willingness to indulge the revanchist fantasy that Hungary can regain the lands it lost after the First World War. On the fate of Greek democracy there is silence, however, although there is much that Europe's leaders might talk about.

You spot the pressure points of a failing state by looking at what it censors. In the case of Greece, the authorities' prosecution last week of Kostas Vaxevanis showed that he had hit a pressure point with the accuracy of a doctor sticking a needle into a nerve. While Greeks live with austerity without end, while Greek GDP has shrunk by 4.5% in 2010 and 6.9% in 2011, and will shrink by a predicted 6.5% this year and 4.5% in 2013, the list of the names of 2,000 Greeks with bank accounts in Switzerland Vaxevanis published, suggested that the well-connected were escaping the burdens that fall on the masses.

"Instead of arresting the tax evaders and the ministers who had the list in their hands," thundered Vaxevanis in a call to arms that stirred the blood, "they're trying to arrest the truth and freedom of the press."

His acquittal on privacy law charges, though welcome, was less important than it appeared. It did not mean that freedom of the press was secure in Greece. Even in good times, independent journalism has rarely been a force in the land. Most Greek TV stations and newspapers are owned by either the state or plutocratic corporations, neither of which likes seeing corruption exposed. The leftwing daily, Eleftherotypia, which for all its faults and flirtations with terrorism at least challenged the oligarchs, filed for bankruptcy last year.

Few of the employees of the remaining Greek news organisations reject the notion that they should keep quiet in the interests of holding on to their pay cheques. The state is hounding too many of those who do. "We still have freedom of expression recognised by the law at a theoretical level," said Asteris Masouras, one of the free speech monitors at Global Voices. "On a practical level, well..." And he proceeded to give me a list of instances of menacing forces intimidating reporters that would go on into the New Review section if I ran it in full.

Where to begin? How about the self-defeating austerity policies the troika of the European Central Bank, European Commission and International Monetary Fund have forced on Greece? The authorities used an old warrant to arrest Spiros Karatzaferis, after the journalist threatened to reveal confidential emails, that might have explained how the troika's alleged "rescue package" had pushed the country into depression.

Police brutality is another pressure point, undoubtedly. The Greek left makes persistent allegations of collaboration between the supposed forces of law and order and the thugs in the neo-Nazi Golden Dawnmovement. The Guardian ran reports that the police had beaten up anti-fascist demonstrators after they had confronted Golden Dawn. Yes, I know leftists call everyone "fascists" from headteachers to their mums and dads, but as Golden Dawn is building a mass movement while marching under a swastika, the term is correct on this occasion. The following day, Greek state TV replaced Kostas Arvanitis and Marilena Katsimi, the presenters of its morning news show, after they told managers they planned to follow up the Guardian's claims. Another state TV reporter, Christos Dantis, has joined the ranks of the vanishing journalists. His editors assigned him to cover the celebrations of the centenary of the liberation of Thessaloniki from Ottoman rule. He was about to report on popular protests against the presence of the Greek prime minister and president in Greece's second city when his masters turned off the camera and cut to a more amenable hack.

All the Greek journalists I spoke to emphasised that Athens was not Beijing or Tehran, but they described how the liberal certainties they once held now appeared flimsy. Helena Smith, our superb Athens correspondent, says that she feels as if she is standing on shifting sands. If the centrist coalition fails, and the troika's punitive demands have condemned it to failure, then the left opposition in Syrzia will probably take over. After that, Golden Dawn, maybe? No one knows. Nothing is unthinkable in a climate of fear and hopelessness.

One can say with certainty that old alliances between extreme political and extreme religious movements are reviving. Hence, last month Christian fanatics and neo-Nazis (and the difference between the two is fine) protested against a "blasphemous" play with a homosexual theme in Athens. The theatre's management duly pulled it. Greek television cut a scene from Downton Abbey that featured a gay kiss. No one can explain why but a country that censors Downton Abbey on any grounds other than literary taste is in grave trouble.

British Eurosceptics do not understand that the European Union once offered an escape to a liberal future for the peoples of Europe. When I visited Athens in the early 1980s, the old could remember fighting the Nazi occupation and the young had grown up in and on occasion fought the military dictatorship the colonels imposed. Joining the European Union meant saying goodbye to all of that. Now poverty, fear, suppression and state intimidation are back.

You can blame the corruption Greek society tolerated. You can blame the bankers for the crash. But you must also apportion blame to Europe's politicians and bureaucrats who accepted Greece (and the rest of southern Europe) into a single currency area that has put them at a permanent competitive disadvantage and refused to write off debts Greece can never repay.

No wonder they stay silent about the abuse of the human rights the Nobel prize committee insisted European integration guaranteed. Greece is the Eurocrats' very own Weimar on the Aegean. They helped build it.

Greece gave birth to democracy. Now it has been cast out by a powerful elite

'The then minister of finance, George Papaconstantinou, was handed a list of Greeks who held bank accounts abroad. This list was never investigated.' 

Πηγή: The Guardian
By Kostas Vaxevanis
Oct 31 2012

"The more laws a country has, the more corrupt it is," the Roman historian Tacitus used to say. Greece has quite a few laws. So many, in fact, that corruption can feel quite safe. An exclusive club of powerful people engages in illegal practices, then pushes through necessary laws to legalise these practices, granting itself an amnesty, and in the end, there are no media to uncover what really happened.

As I write, the adventures of an independent magazine in Greece, Hot Doc, which I edit, are being discussed worldwide. Our publication of a list of alleged Swiss bank account holders, and my subsequent arrest, has provoked a storm. But not in the Greek media. A few months ago, Reuters and the British press uncovered scandals involving Greek banks. The Greek media didn't write anything then either. The space that should have been granted to reports about these scandals was occupied by paid advertisements sponsored by the very people who caused the Greek banks to go under.

The "Lagarde" case in Greece is merely an extreme expression of this situation. In 2010, Lagarde handed to the then minister of finance, George Papaconstantinou, a list of Greeks who held bank accounts abroad. Some of this was "black money" – money that may not have been taxed or needed to be laundered. In a convuloted train of events, Papaconstinou admitted to losing the original data, but was able to pass another copy to his successor Evangelos Venizelos, who eventually admitted to having held it but has failed to produce it so far. The list has still never been properly investigated.

For the past two years, the issue of naming people who are assumed to hold bank accounts in Switzerland has poisoned political life in Greece, with political and financial blackmail taking place in the dark rooms of corrupt power. It's in this context that Hot Doc published 2,059 names of Greeks alleged to have Swiss bank accounts, without specifying the amount of their deposits or any other personal information.

And then, with utmost hypocrisy the powers that be remembered what they were about. The Athens prosecutor made a move ex officio and ordered my immediate arrest. The law on personal data was invoked as a basis for indictment. In reality, though, there was no personal data involved – only the fact that certain individuals held an account in a certain bank. We did not even allege that these individuals were guilty, only called for an investigation.

Dealings with banks are carried out in public, not in secrecy. The existence of a bank account is therefore not personal data. Personal data would be the amount and type of transactions. In Greece, banks send envelopes with their logos, in which they enclose transaction details; in other words, they declare their relationship with customers. Nevertheless, the publication of a plain list of names and a demand to investigate was defined as exposing personal data.

In Ancient Greek mythology, justice is presented as blind. In modern Greece, it is merely winking and nodding. A study of the Lagarde list is highly revealing. Publishers, businessmen, shipowners, the entire system of power is shown to have transferred money abroad. And this is information from only one bank. Meanwhile in Greece, people are going through dumpsters for food.

The crisis in Greece wasn't caused by everyone. And not everyone is paying for the crisis. The exclusive, corrupt club of power tries to save itself by pretending to make efforts to save Greece. In reality, it is exacerbating Greece's contradictions, while Greece is teetering on the edge of a cliff.

If in the Bible, sinners "strain out the gnat and swallow the camel", in Greece the sinful powers that be strain out pensions and swallow lists – in order, of course, to make them disappear. These are the lists of their friends, acquaintances, favourites and mess mates.

In the country that, as we like to remind ourselves, gave birth to democracy, democracy has become a strange new breed. Those in charge make sure that the right to vote come across as democracy, while negating democracy in the way they abuse the rights voters give them. And justice remains in thrall to politics.