PASOK leader refuses private briefing on wiretapping affair
PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis, who discovered he was being spied on by Greece’s intelligence agency EYP, said on Wednesday that he is not going to accept an unofficial briefing on the affair, as suggested by the conservative administration, and that he has no trust in government ministers.
Earlier in the day, government spokesperson Giannis Oikonomou claimed that “these issues” should not be discussed in public.
“If I had not been a member of the European Parliament, today both I and the entire Greek people, would not have known about the deep state methods used by the current government,” he said in a statement. “We would not have known that, in September 2021, shortly after the announcement of my candidacy for the leadership of PASOK, the National Intelligence Service began monitoring me and a few days later there was an attempt to tap my mobile phone using the Predator software,” he said.
“By monitoring me, an entire party was also monitored, including former prime ministers, members of parliament, and members of the party, who talked with me regularly about the developments. It wasn’t just me they were monitoring, but an entire democratic party,” he added.
Androulakis also referred to a suggestion by Oikonomou that the file created by EYP may have been destroyed by now. “I will not tolerate ‘loss’ or tampering with data. I will not play the conspiracy game with leaks about foreign countries,” he said.
He then asked for the file to be immediately forwarded to the Parliament’s Institutions and Transparency Committee and for an official briefing of Greece’s regulator on communication privacy, ADAE, and the Hellenic Data Protection Authority (DPA) about the reasons for what he described as an “illegal and unconstitutional monitoring” by EYP.
The scandal prompted the resignations of the head of EYP, Panagiotis Kontoleon and a top aide to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, his secretary-general Grigoris Dimitriadis.
