Greece’s former Prime Minister Lucas Papademos responded at lightning speed after Independent Greeks and Golden Dawn announced officially their intentions to hold him liable in the "Lagarde List" case.
The Prime Minister of the interim government, which negotiated the second bailout package for Greece and implemented the major debt restructuring last year, has sent to parliament an affidavit in the case as reported by Naftemporiki. In it, Papademos denies having been informed officially about the specific list during his term as Prime Minister of Greece and insists that he bears no responsibility for the actions that were carried out with the list of names of Greeks with bank accounts in Switzerland.
Golden Dawn’s spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris insists that the governments of Papandreou and Papademos
were able and even obliged to use the "Lagarde List". They could have checked and established whether the funds in the bank accounts of Greek citizens in the Swiss branch of HSBC corresponded to their income and if this was not the case, all of them (George Papakonstantinou, George Papandreou, Lucas Papademos and Evangelos Venizelos) should face the special commission.
Meanwhile, Dimitris Papadimoulis from SYRIZA accused the parties in the government of wanting to create tension among the deputies of PASOK and New Democracy and making them vote for seeking liability only from George Papakonstantinou. According to SYRIZA, the government is trying to cover the responsibility that Evangelos Venizelos, as the successor of Papakonstantinou, bears in blocking the investigation of the people on the "Lagarde List".
Evangelos Venizelos, in turn, accused SYRIZA of political hypocrisy and audacity from the floor of the National Assembly. The opinion of the government coalition is that his name has been involved in the scandal only to shake the stability of the government instead of finding the truth about the case. The evidence to date indicates George Papakonstantinou as the prime suspect in the violation, who has a direct connection with the persons, deleted from the first version of the list of potential tax offenders. So far, according to government advocates, there has been neither direct nor indirect evidence to link Venizelos with this case.
Zoe Konstantopoulou, also from SYRIZA, insists that Papakonstantinou and Venizelos bear equal responsibility in keeping the USB memory containing the data of Greeks with accounts abroad. In her opinion, their attempts to conceal the information on the removable memory are a crime against the taxpayers in the country. The radical left insists that they both be investigated for treason to the state and for giving false testimony before the parliamentary commission on transparency and the people.
"Our country is the only one which has not received a single euro from the existence of this list while other countries have been able to obtain millions or even billions of euro due to the checks of the funds in the bank accounts on the same list," said Konstantopoulou in a speech. She insists that the government is concealing Evangelos Venizelos’ responsibility for his criminal inaction on tax unfairness and the "Lagarde List".
Today’s leader of PASOK hastened to indirectly respond to the attacks of his political opponents with a message on his Twitter profile: "Neither I nor PASOK need protection. The creators of this manipulation need protection."