G. Varoufakis: The Prime Minister is personally responsible for the illegal surveillance

The head of MeRA25 Yanis Varoufakis appeared strongly critical of the government’s handling of the case of monitoring the mobile phone of PASOK-KINAL president Nikos Androulakis, attributing personal responsibility to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis himself, during the pre-day debate in Parliament, in level of political leaders.

At the same time, Mr. Varoufakis stated that he will support PASOK’s proposal for the establishment of a commission of inquiry – which will be discussed next Monday in the Plenary – on the condition, as he said, that previous monitoring will also be expanded.

Mr. Varoufakis accused Kyriakos Mitsotakis of not giving any answer to the serious and crucial questions arising from the revelations about the illegal surveillance of politicians and journalists, while he called the government MPs’ applause to the prime minister a “farewell rehearsal”.

“You were a bubble and like a bubble you burst. It doesn’t matter why and how, but the project to re-elect Prime Minister Mitsotakis, based on the ND-PASOK government, was canceled. And your removal is necessary, in order to revive the possibility of having a democracy at some point in this country,” said Mr. Varoufakis.

“It is not the job of the prime minister in our parliamentary government to be the institutional head of the EYP. This would suit other regimes, not a democratic regime.

You took EYP into your own hands. And when the bomb went off you washed your hands, saying, I didn’t know, if I had known I wouldn’t have allowed it,” said the head of MeRA25 and added:

“Mr. Mitsotakis, you choose humiliation to convince yourself that you are not guilty. But in the end you ended up both guilty and humiliated. You tried to hide behind the… and what happened, all prime ministers do the same. But here we are not talking about the memoranda, which, yes, you all signed. Here we are talking about the Greek Watergate – that’s what the newspaper that revealed Watergate, the Washington Post, calls it. Will you also label them Syrians, communists, followers of MeRA?”.

Mr. Varoufakis, responding to the question put to him by the prime minister if his phone was monitored during the SYRIZA government, said that “every word that I have testified in the Parliament and I have written in my book is valid and the words that the ND trolls put are not valid in my mouth”.

“I never said that I was being watched by Tsipras or SYRIZA.

Yes, it is true that my phone was monitored from 2015 until at least 2020, mostly by the NSA – something that has been proven by hard evidence in Spanish courts, evidence that is available to you if you want it and included in the Spanish court file the contents of my mobile, videos and recorded conversations. The reason I publicly summoned the head of the EYP at the time was for spreading false news against me,” he said characteristically and added:

“Yes, we at MeRA25 are also abandoning SYRIZA, because they let their own leader of the EYP spread lies before the referendum, because during the presidency of Voutsis, here in the Parliament, he did not inform the political leaders about the exponentially increasing lifting of privacy of Greek citizens, because did not at least restore the democratic safeguards of citizens of the 1994 law of PASOK.

But these are misdemeanors compared to your own personal crimes, Mr. Mitsotakis.”

Mr. Varoufakis stated that his party will “support the proposal for the establishment of a commission of inquiry submitted by PASOK, whose president was one of the victims of the Mitsotaki corporate parastate” and added:

“We will not pressure Mr. Mitsotakis to offset his crimes with unacceptable situations of the past.

But we will ask that three specific things be investigated:

First: The monitoring of KKE people.

Second: How and why, Mr. Rammos, as the president of the Telecommunications Privacy Authority, himself does not have the ability to know which Greek citizens are being monitored, whether the appeals prosecutor, who gives the green light for the surveillance , ever found out that he authorized the surveillance of a journalist, a political leader.

Third: What did and what is the EYP doing after 2005 to prevent the NSA from monitoring half of the Council of Ministers and another 100 officials of the Greek state”.

“MeRA25 is in favor of transparent corporate and state power with protected citizens, journalists, activists and, yes, politicians” pointed out Mr. Varoufakis, while he argued that with the wiretapping case the Constitution and what was left of civil Democracy.

“For us, for MERA25, the point is not just for you to fall, but for there to be a total break with the regime that promoted you and now puts you on ice,” concluded Mr. Varoufakis.

Source: AMPE