ND member sues ex-PM Karamanlis
A former member of the New Democracy party has filed a lawsuit against ex-Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis, former Health Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos and ex-Economy and Finance Minister Yiannis Papathanassiou for being the moral instigators behind Greece providing the European Commission last year with false figures about its debt. Themis Kazantzidis, who runs a hospital supplies business and is a member of the conservative party, said that he contacted the office of then European Monetary Affairs Commissioner Joaquin Almunia in March 2009 to inform him that the government was not providing the correct figure for the amount owed by state hospitals to Greece’s statistics service, which in turn passed on the figure to Eurostat. Kazantzidis claims a Health Ministry official who did not speak English signed a document confirming the figures Greece had provided to Eurostat were correct. Kazantzidis’s suit was submitted to Supreme Court prosecutor Yiannis Tentes.
