A three-justice appeals court in Athens on Tuesday handed down a two-year suspended sentence against the former head of Greece’s statistics bureau (EL.STAT) after finding him guilty on one of two breach of faith charges, a misdemeanor.
According to the ruling by the court, Andreas Georgiou’s culpability lies in the fact that he did not brief EL.STAT’s board of directors on the transfer of data – in November 2010 – concerning the ballooning state deficit of 2009.
The three-justice court did not recognize any mitigating circumstances and handed down the maximum possible sentence allowed by law, a day after the bench prosecutor also recommended a guilty verdict.
Georgiou, who assumed the post of the Greek Statistical Service in 2010, at the advent of the punishing economic crisis, and who later departed in 2015, was acquitted of other misdemeanor charges, i.e. not convening EL.STAT’s board in a timely manner and of retaining a position with the IMF in tandem with presiding over the country’s statistical service.
He still faces another legal battle over a charge of felony perjury, a case that has found its way to Greece’s supreme court, after a high court prosecutor last month quashed another appellate council’s acquittal of the charge.
Georgiou’s legal saga has generated high-level criticism on the part of Greece’s institutional creditors, with some pointing to a “witch hunt” in order to claim that the former intentionally inflated the 2009 deficit figures in order to justify the country’s first IMF-engineered bailout, beginning in May 2010.
