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Eurozone
Varoufakis could face treason charges for planning alternative currency
His immunity to prosecution as a member of parliament must be revoked first.
FORMER GREEK FINANCE Minister Yanis Varoufakis could face charges of high treason for planning the introduction of an alternative currency if bailout negotiations failed.
Varoufakis’s claimed to have “hacked” into his own ministry.
He said his actions ‘respected the laws of the land’.
In a telephone conversation with a group of London-based investors after he resigned his post earlier this month, Varoufakis claimed that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had “given the green light” for a Plan B before coming to power in January, according to a recording released this week.
The goal, the maverick economist said, was to create a “functioning parallel system” of liquidity in case the European Central Bank cut off support to Greece’s banks, as indeed it did after talks with the radical left government on new austerity reforms broke down in June.
Varoufakis said a five-man team under his orders had hacked into the finance ministry and obtained access to the tax file numbers of Greek taxpayers in order to create duplicate accounts.
He said the subterfuge was necessary to avoid alerting Greece’s EU-IMF creditors who “fully” control the Greek state’s revenue mechanism.
Greek media report that the supreme court prosecutor has forwarded two complaints received, one from a mayor in central Greece and another from a lawyer, to parliament.
Immune
Ekathimerini explains that this is because Varoufakis, as a member of parliament, is immune from prosecution. The parliament must now decide whether or not he can be charged.
Varoufakis took to his blog to fire back at the accusations.
“Instead of indicting, and persecuting, those who, to this day, function within the public sector as the troika’s minions and lieutenants (while receiving their substantial salaries from the long-suffering Greek taxpayers),” he wrote, “politicians and parties whom the electorate condemned for their efforts to turn Greece into a protectorate are now persecuting me, aided and abetted by the oligarchs’ media.
“I wear their accusations as badges of honour.”
The aim of my self-styled persecutors is to characterise our defiant negotiating stance as an aberration, an error or, even better from the perspective of Greece’s troika-friendly oligarchic establishment, as a ‘crime’ against Greece’s national interest.
Additional reporting © – AFP, 2015
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