OPINION

Anything else we should know of?

Anything else we should know of?

To put it as politely as possible, the guy is crazy. Not because he had a drachma plan which nobody asked for, or because he divulged it during a teleconference which he knew was being recorded. He’s crazy because he believed that one hacker along with his own, incomparable genius, were enough to transform the Greek state overnight, turning it into a super-efficient mechanism capable of managing the transition to a new monetary system.

Picture the scene: Yanis Varoufakis sitting at his desk – as seen in Paris Match – smiling smugly at the questions asked by the investors, people who thought they were dealing with a serious man, a former finance minister after all, of a country caught in the turmoil of a tough crisis. It’s hard to say how his interlocutors felt when they heard him speak of a friend hacking into the country’s tax system. One can only imagine that they came to realize a number things at that point: not only regarding the state of the man leading Greece’s financial team but the country as a whole. Surely they were no longer prepared to invest in the country – they would have even cancelled their Greek holiday if any of them were planning on coming over.

But Varoufakis is Yanis, the man who dropped one ‘n’ from his first name in order to stand out. Questions are now lingering over Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who entrusted Varoufakis with the top mission. Didn’t Tsipras suspect anything from the missing ‘n’? Or by the fact that Varoufakis arrived looking like a “bouncer” (according to UK media) for a meeting with British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne? Didn’t Tsipras suspect anything when he saw Varoufakis smiling vainly as he spoke of “knowing people in high places” and of his elaborate nonsense regarding Game Theory?

Did Tsipras expect that a raised collar would be the ultimate argument allowing Varoufakis to get billions from the eurozone without giving anything in return?

No matter how ludicrous it may be, this Plan B is now raising even more questions than the one devised by the people close to Panayiotis Lafazanis, which including breaking into the National Mint. When were Greeks supposed to find out what was revealed by the international investors? Through an e-mail sent by Greek-Anonymous with a pin number for the hacked online Taxis system?

One last thing: Exactly under what circumstances did the teleconference take place? Was it a friendly conversation, an opportunity for old friends to talk about Yanis’s experiences at the ministry, or is there something else which the former minister ought to be telling the Greek people?

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