Greek financial stats for 2009 were reliable, says EC spokesperson
The European Commission believes that Greek financial statistics for 2009 were reliable, European Commission spokesperson Emer Traynor, a representative of commissioner Algirdas Semeta, responsible for taxation and customs union, audit and anti-fraud, said on Wednesday.
Traynor’s comment followed a call on Tuesday by Greek financial prosecutors for a magistrate to conduct a probe into whether the chief of Greece’s statistical agency, ELSTAT, Andreas Georgiou, along with two of his colleagues, had artificially inflated the size of Greece’s budget deficit back in 2009 in order to justify an European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank bailout.
Zoe Georganta, a former ELSTAT employee, has claimed that Georgiou inflated the country’s deficit for 2009 to over 15 percent of gross domestic product, a figure which was three times higher than the conservative government’s forecast for that year.
