Greece: Arrest and evasion

GREEK JOURNALIST Kostas Vaxevanis.-GEORGIA PANAGOPOULO/AFP

THE arrest of a Greek investigative journalist, Kostas Vaxevanis, in late October, for publishing the names of 2,059 Greek politicians and businessmen who figured on the Lagarde list unleashed a storm of protest among civil rights groups all over Europe. The list containing the names of prominent people said to be having accounts in an HSBC bank in Switzerland was given in 2010 by Christine Lagarde, now President of the International Monetary Fund, to Giorgous Papaconstantinou, the then Greek Finance Minister.

The list was originally stolen by a disgruntled HSBC employee and given to Christine Lagarde, who was then the French Finance Minister. The list contained names of many Greek citizens who had allegedly secreted their ill-gotten wealth in Swiss bank accounts and evaded tax. Some of them had deposits of more than 500 million euros. Two people named in the list committed suicide. The Greek government had refused to reveal the names and evidently failed to take follow-up action. After the list was made public, the government said it would take action against some of the people whom the media had targeted. Vaxevanis, the editor of Hot Doc magazine, was arrested on the grounds that he broke private confidentiality laws. His arrest came at a time when the government was on the verge of passing another tranche of stiff austerity measures on an already overburdened people in order to qualify for a $40 billion European Union bailout fund. Vaxevanis said his arrest was politically motivated. The public outcry and condemnation apparently forced a rethink by the authorities and they released Vaxevanis.

Speaking to reporters after his release, Vaxevanis said journalists in Greece have been held hostage for a very long time. One journalist said it was the Finance Minister who should have been arrested for not taking action against tax evaders. Questions are also being asked why no action has been taken against two former Finance Ministers who failed to move against tax defaulters. Evangelos Venizelos, now the leader of the centre-left Pasok party, which is part of the three-party coalition running the government, was the Finance Minister in the last government.

But the Greek government is far from being chastened by the events. Yet another journalist, Spiros Karatzaferis, was arrested briefly after he was on the verge of revealing damaging information about the economy. He said he had received information from the hackers group Anonymous that the scale of the Greek deficit was overblown. He concluded that the Greek people were being unnecessarily subjected to harsh austerity measures, which, in turn, had led to record unemployment and rising poverty.

John Cherian