With a barrage of attacks on the government and Kyriakos Mitsotakis personally, Nikos Androulakis and Alexis Tsipras stepped up their opposition.The label “high priest of corruption” applied to the prime minister by the president of ELAS set the tone, while the PASOK leader accused the government of leaving borrowers “exposed to the jaws of funds and servicers”.
With non-performing loans at the centre of their attacks, and the tabling of the much-discussed “Article 23” as the catalyst — it was eventually withdrawn after opposition parties and legal experts objected — the two political leaders vying for primacy in the progressive camp made clear yesterday that the issue would remain high on their agendas.
Speaking at an event organised by PASOK’s Outreach Committee, Mr Androulakis said that, instead of protecting citizens, the New Democracy government was leaving them exposed to the “jaws” of funds and servicers. He noted that, had the Finance Ministry not been forced to withdraw “Article 23” — crediting its withdrawal to his party’s robust opposition — thousands of borrowers could have faced the loss of their property over arrears of just a few months.
Beyond these issues, Mr Androulakis focused on foreign policy, citing the “diplomatic failure in Libya”.
He said that, seven years after New Democracy took office, eastern Libya had confirmed the illegality of the Turkish-Libyan memorandum, undermining government claims that “old wounds” had been healed.
He also called the government’s argument that there was “calm in the Aegean” baseless, at a time when Ankara is escalating its aggression, enshrining the “Blue Homeland” doctrine in law and obstructing projects of European interest, such as the Greece-Cyprus electricity interconnection.
“Does ‘calm waters’ mean being unable to complete a project of European interest within your own exclusive economic zone? Should we be reading that the illegal, aggressive ‘Blue Homeland’ doctrine is to be enshrined in law? That is not ‘calm waters’. It shows that Turkish aggression continues unabated,” he concluded.
Tsipras: Not a single euro went to funds on my watch
In an interview with BEST TV during a visit to Kalamata yesterday, Mr Tsipras focused on non-performing loans, responding to criticism — including from PASOK — that the practices of funds and servicers had been institutionalised under his government.
“In December 2015, in the first difficult days of the bailout programmes, the troika came and imposed a framework that allowed servicers and funds to operate,” he said.
He added that, until the day he left the Maximos Mansion, “not a single euro passed from the banks to the funds”, because “there was a strict framework that protected property owners through legislation stipulating that, before any transfer, the borrower had to be given the opportunity to agree a restructuring”.
By contrast, he described the situation that followed, in which “the Mitsotakis government, through a series of legislative interventions — chief among them the Hercules scheme — gave funds the ability to plunder borrowers”.
The former prime minister returned yesterday to the same question: “Who instructed Mr Pierrakakis and Mr Mitsotakis to introduce ‘Article 23’, which they were subsequently forced to withdraw?”
He offered an indirect answer, saying that the Mitsotakis government “knows only how to provide guarantees for funds and servicers, and deceives the public by claiming that ‘Article 23’ would make things easier for borrowers. It would have allowed foreclosure proceedings to go ahead without any prior court ruling. In effect, it would have given them a free hand”.
Corruption, AADE and “junk overboard”
Beyond this issue, Mr Tsipras also spoke in particularly forceful terms about corruption, amid a series of cases that have “broken” one after another in recent days.
Suggesting that the revelations were being rushed out and handled clumsily to save the government after 7.5 years of inaction or encouragement, he said, among other things: “As the boat sinks under the weight of corruption, Mr Mitsotakis throws the junk overboard, jettisoning the ballast to save himself. But he does it so clumsily that it becomes even more obvious how adrift he and his government are.”
Referring to reports that 25 AADE officials were implicated in the scandal involving the company “Choriatiko”, he asked why the government had entrusted the OPEKEPE brief to that authority.
“What is the logic of assigning it to an independent authority — AADE — that has been dismantled, as everything in our country has under the Mitsotakis government? What is the logic of assigning it to an authority that was incapable of tackling such cases of corruption, tax avoidance and tax evasion, cases that were all but common knowledge, and of handing OPEKEPE over to it as well? So what will AADE do about OPEKEPE, when it could not shed light on these cases — a scandal that is perhaps one of the biggest this government has handled?” he said.
The former prime minister stressed the need to form a strong progressive government with ELAS at its core and, naturally, ruled out any possibility of a coalition government with New Democracy.