Lies, damned lies, and Greek statistics
Guest post by Sigrún Davídsdóttir The word “trust” has been mentioned time and again in reports on the tortuous negotiations on Greece. One reason is the persistent deceit in reporting on debt and deficit statistics, including lying about an off market swap with Goldman Sachs: not a one-off deceit but a political interference through concerted action among several public institutions for more then ten years. As late as in the July 12 Euro Summit statement "safeguarding of the full legal independence of ELSTAT” was stated as a required measure. Worryingly, Andreas Georgiou president of ELSTAT from 2010, the man who set the statistics straight, and some of his staff, have been hounded by political forces, including Syriza. Further, a Greek parliamentary investigation aims to show that foreigners are to blame for the "odious" debt. But there is no effort to clarify a decade of falsifying statistics. In Iceland there were also voices blaming its collapse on foreigners...