Greek parliament rejects the inquiry committee on the memorandum

The SYRIZA proposal for an inquiry committee concerning the memorandum was rejected by 167 MPs over 119, but the main opposition party’s leadership is determined to insist on the need to investigate the circumstances under which Greece was driven to it.

According to information, it will come back with a new proposal based on the file that arrived recently in parliament, which includes allegations by Greece’s former representative to the IMF Panagiotis Roumeliotis, requesting a preliminary or inquiry committee. This was also confirmed by parliamentary spokesman Dimitris Papadimoulis, who said that "if our proposal gets voted down today, we will then ask for Roumeliotis’ file and come back with a proposal for the preliminary inquiry on the memorandum."

Roumeliotis' case file contains shocking additional evidence, as revealed in parliament by Zoe Konstantopoulou, who was assigned by SYRIZA to study the files and recorded word for word the two documents that inexorably generate questions about the handlings of George Papandreou and Yorgos Papakonstantinou.

According to Konstantopoulou's faithful copy the first document, classified as "top secret", was sent from Roumeliotis to Provopoulos on 29.03.2010 (before the signing of the first memorandum), and among other things it reads: "The fiscal adjustment should also be realistic. Even with additional fiscal measures of about 2 to 2.5% of the GDP each year for a period of 5 years, the debt to GDP ratio will rise to about 150% by 2013 before stabilizing and slowly starting to decline. A much quicker adjustment - such as that implied by the 3% of the GDP deficit in 2012 - set by the stability and growth program, will be very risky. Greece is a relatively closed economy and fiscal contradiction required by this fiscal path will cause powerful conflicts between domestic demand and the deep recession that will seriously damage the social fabric. It is not certain that this can be technically implemented, as for the cuts to last it would require reforms and changes in program benefits, which will take time to be implemented and produce results."

The second document, dated 1.4.2010 and classified as "extremely urgent", was sent by the Greek Embassy in Washington to the general secretariat of Management, Economic Cooperation and Development Cooperation and communicated to then prime minister, Finance minister and Zanias, among other people.

Its subject is "Meeting with the relevant U.S. Treasury director on the issue of the Greek economy," and the text is divided into two paragraphs:

-       the IMF would never compel a government to reduce the budget deficit by 4 percentage points in 1 year (a target which is deemed too ambitious and rather impossible as there is no previous occurrence in global economic history)

-       in order for the efforts to deal with an economic crisis to be effective, they should have a long run and avoid as much as possible social tensions or excessive outbreaks that will undermine the whole project or delay its implementation.