The establishment of a special parliamentary committee that will examine where the resources of the Recovery Fund were directed was proposed by Nikos Androulakis.
Speaking in the Plenary, on the occasion of PASOK’s interpellation on how the resources of this Fund were used, he essentially referred to the scrutiny that the next Parliament will carry out: “In the next elections, with political change, we will check where even the last euro went. How it was used and which crafty people profited at the expense of society, he said.
Adding, addressing the government: “Because you are champions, not only in toxicity, not only in the clientelist state, not only in the collapse of the welfare state, not only in the dismantling of the institutions of democracy and parliament, but also in direct awards and in supposed tenders that are rigged.”
Mr. Androulakis asked the government: “Did you achieve resilience? Did you achieve the goals of changing citizens’ lives and reconstructing the productive model that also led us to the 2009 crisis?”
And he gave the answers: “No. You achieved nothing, so that citizens and society feel that it brought bold changes.
Instead of designing a coherent strategic framework for the Recovery Fund, there were no clear priorities, lists of projects that you constantly revised, no consultation, no dialogue, as happened in other countries, with Local Government, with the Chambers, with local societies. Everything was a closed circuit of power of Maximos, which organized this whole plan.
From the outset, we asked for greater emphasis on public infrastructure, on the railway, on investments, on networks for energy storage. Why? Because these are what we must do to achieve what other European countries have achieved. Cheap transport with safety and a low cost of living and production, with cheap energy for households and for the real producers.
You want a green transition, but not for the many, for the few. Business, as our MP also mentioned earlier.
I proposed a revision of the Recovery Fund when I saw all these distortions, Mr. Papathanasis.
We proposed more money for the NHS that is collapsing. We proposed money for social housing on the models of Portugal, Spain, Italy.”
He also recalled the answer the prime minister had given him when he proposed the above (and not only) for the use of the Fund: “What did you answer me? Do you remember? The Prime Minister himself. That I am a populist and indeed that I deserve the... ‘Nobel Prize for Irrelevance,’ because the Recovery Fund is not revised.
And not only did you revise it afterwards—although, as you said, we “didn’t know” and supposedly were saying “lies”—you revised it four times, proving that you are both amateurs and incapable of planning properly on the basis of the European Union framework.
The result: Even Christoforos Pissarides —on whose proposals “Greece 2.0” was based— publicly acknowledged that mainly the easy changes were made, but the reforms that would bring productive transformation to the country remain a demand.”