Greek fall guy casts pall over recovery

After years of punishing austerity, Greece finally has grounds to hope it will regain its financial independence when its bail-out programme ends in the northern summer.

Yet despite the huge efforts made to put the public finances on a more sustainable trajectory, there remain serious doubts over the government’s commitment to reform the Greek state, rid institutions of political influence and guarantee the rule of law.

The conviction last week of Andreas Georgiou, the country’s former chief statistician, for “violating” his duties during the sovereign debt crisis is especially worrying. Georgiou has for six years been fighting accusations that, as head of Elstat, the statistical agency, he inflated Greece’s 2009 budget deficit, forcing the country to undergo deeper austerity.

No matter that he had been acquitted of these charges a few months earlier, only to have the case reopened. No matter that the EU’s statisticians, whose standards he was supposed to be following, have endorsed the procedures he followed and the figures he produced, describing last week’s trial as a “preset farce”. Georgiou — a former IMF official and thus part of a hated international technocracy — is a convenient scapegoat for the failures of Greece’s political class.

The case exposes the limits of EU influence. Ensuring Elstat’s independence is in theory a condition of the bail-out. European finance ministers had urged Athens to “solve” the issue. The Greek judiciary has responded by suggesting that Georgiou’s conviction is proof of their own independence from external meddling.

This is cynical, to say the least. The unusual decision to revive charges against Georgiou after an acquittal looks more like a concerted attempt to whitewash the Karamanlis government of 2004-09, which presided over the worst excesses of overborrowing while fiddling the figures. London, August 7.