What is happening with the “Greek Watergate”
Italics by Teo Dalavecuras
In recent days, the online newsletter of Politico dedicated to the background and also to the background of the European Union, Brussels Playbook , has no longer dealt with the so-called "Greek Watergate", to which in recent weeks it had dedicated a full-blown press campaign, offering solid support to the Syriza opposition attempt to bring about the fall of the government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the consequent early elections.
It was the interception, by the Hellenic Services, of the head of the second opposition party, MEP Nikos Androulakis, who also recently resigned because his status as a member of the European Parliament deprived him of the right of parliamentary intervention. Hellenic, the Voulì, which would have ended up making his position unsustainable).
Immediately after the emergence of the affair, in a few days and with the accession of the government, the establishment of a parliamentary commission of inquiry on the Services was resolved. Syriza insisted that the investigation field be limited only to the last few years, those of the Mitsotakis government, motivating, with unusual and perhaps involuntary frankness, that by expanding the parliamentary investigation also to previous governments, public opinion would be "disoriented": purpose of the investigation parliamentarians evidently being, at least for the president of Syriza, to "guide" – a delicate euphemism – public opinion.
Then the Parliamentary Commission began its hearings and the former heads of the Eyp, the Greek intelligence service, were heard. This made it possible to confirm another episode – truly singular – which this time had as protagonists the Services at the time of the Syriza-Anel government (2015-2019): the interception of Stergios Pitsiorlas. He had been chosen by Tsipras to hold the very delicate position of president of the Taiped, the body entrusted with the enhancement (essentially the privatization) of the available assets of the State and other public bodies, which therefore also have relations with potentially interested investors. The interception was interrupted when Pitsiorlas left Taiped to take up the post of Deputy Minister of Economy and Development in the government headed by Tsipras. The episode appears singular because Pitsiorlas was certainly not an opponent, if anything he belonged – at least on paper – to Tsipras's "magic circle": activist and then political leader in the left wing, first in the "internal" Communist party, (the one who aspired to re-propose Enrico Berlinguer's PCI policy in Greece), and then in the movement that would become Syriza; plus the practice of lawyer and subsequently that of entrepreneur (in the field of renewable energy).
Heard by the Commission, Yannis Roubatis, head of the Eyp appointed by Tsipras on 30 January 2015 and remained in office until July 2019, confirmed the interception of Pitsiorlas and admitted that Tsipras was aware of it. Which he could only confirm in turn, adding: “I have no explanations to give to anyone. I put the national interest above all else ”. We will see if and how this "dialogue" at a distance between Pitsiorlas and Tsipras will develop.
There was a modest attempt at a "counterattack": Syriza MP Christos Spirtzis, who had suddenly remembered a message containing a "suspicious" link received from his mobile phone last year, addressed the judiciary; but the initiative, advertised by the interested party, runs the risk of turning out to be an own goal, since Spirtzis appeared unprepared and gave rather confused answers to the obvious question as to why that suspicious message had come back to his mind just now. But these are just waste.
What risks ridiculing the narrative, tinged with virginal scandal, with which Tsipras wanted to "enhance" the Androulakis affair in his campaign against the Mitsotakis government (inevitably inducing the other opposition forces to do the same) is instead the content of a report of "Citizen Lab" reported from the Sunday of Ta Nea .
As aficionados of the genre recall, Citizen Lab is that university in Toronto that years ago caused the Pegasus scandal to break out, and forced the Israeli government to embarrassed explanations: the institute had in fact released cell phone numbers of politicians and journalists around the world, monitored night and day through this software created by an Israeli company and sold to governmental bodies in about fifty countries. Ta Nea talks about wiretapping carried out starting from 2016 with the Pegasus software by Otenet (the main Greek telephone operator, controlled by Deutsche Telekom) to which the Eyp also addressed: the same one who intercepted Pitsiorlas's phone. Pitsiorlas now wants to know with what excuse the services of "his" government intercepted him and has declared that, to obtain an answer, he will turn to the judiciary.
In this climate it is not surprising that Yanis Varoufakis, economy minister of the Syriza-Anel government in the first "heroic" six months of 2015 but, above all, Giamburrasca of transnational progressivism, did not want to miss his contribution: "I have strong clues" he told Ta Nea "that when I was minister they also intercepted me German officials". These Germans …
Rather than "Greek Watergate" one wonders if it would not be appropriate to talk about "Pandora's box" inadvertently and perhaps clumsily uncovered by Androulakis and his supporters, given that Pandora's boxes intelligence services are by definition , even those of Athens described by Prime Minister Mitsotakis himself as "structurally and endemically weak".
The turn taken by the “Greek Spying Scandal”, however, understandably no longer stimulates the professional curiosity of Politico journalists. And perhaps not even that of those members of the European Parliament who had rushed to set up their own commission on the “Androulakis case” (& C., we should write at this point).
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/watergate-grecia-syriza/ on Wed, 21 Sep 2022 06:06:44 +0000.