9 April 2012 LE TEMPS GENEVA
Their mission: to bring the Greeks onto the path of
budgetary virtue. Their method: to shake up established practice and insist on
sacrifices. The risk: they may be targeted by anyone with a gripe against the
EU.
Richard Werly
On one side of the room, a window gives onto the ruins of
the Acropolis and the scaffolding assembled by the team of archaeologists with
a brief to watch over this crucible of European civilisation.
On the other, the two screens Yannis Siatras uses to monitor
the stock market, one of which is intermittently displaying the front cover
published by German magazine Focus in February 2010. It shows Vénus de Milo
giving the finger and is accompanied by a headline that announces, "Cheats
in the EU family": a highly symbolic image that is associated with EU
diktats and contempt.
"Show that! And then try to explain that the Union is on our side", complains Yannis, a former
financial editor, who is tempted to run for a seat at the next general election
in May.
Silence as a first line of defence
We had already been warned by Kostas Pappas, a spokesman for
the permanent representation of Greece in Brussels, "Beware of clichés
that poison the atmosphere", so it
was no surprise to hear the same view expressed at the the European Commission
delegation in Athens, which is located just behind the parliament building. On
the other side of the street, the Evzones, soldiers in the traditional
partisans uniform of white tights and pom-pommed hobnailed boots, were changing
the guard, watched by handful of tourists.
One of them, a Greek American, was incensed by the display
of the blue and gold-starred flag of the EU. "They have no place in the
country of Socrates,” he says. “They are immoral servants of banks."
Panos Carvounis is no longer bothered by this type of
accusation. The genteel 50-year-old head of the European Commission
Representation in Greece
is well used to criticism. "I live at home. I go to the cinema without any
fuss, while Greek politicians who have had bad press are afraid to leave their
homes. I am often questioned, but never vilified", he says.
In contrast, other members of the contingent of Eurocrats,
who have been posted in Athens
since the beginning of the crisis in the spring of 2010, have made silence
their first line of defence.
Some 15 experts are deployed in the Greek capital as part of
the Commission’s tasks force to help the country take advantage of EU funds
[Greece has only managed to tap less than a third of the funds made available
to it as part of the EU’s 2007-2013 budget]. A further 30 work for the EU
delegation, and also serve as a secretariat for the troika, the tripartite
agency (Commission, International Monetary Fund, European Central Bank) with a
brief to implement the agreement that was finally accepted by Greek leaders in
mid-March.
This latter group are charged with supervising the second
€130 billion European bailout that will finance Athens until the end of 2014: a
sum that has been made available in addition to the first €110 billion lent by
the 27-member EU in 2010, and the €107 billion of debt that the country’s
private creditors accepted to write off within the framework of a bond swap
which will be completed by 18 April.
Officials under police protection
In view of their mission to provide assistance in the
release of funds, the members of the task force, which is soon to be doubled in
size, are largely popular. In contrast, the brief for officials working for the
troika is to supervise, verify and audit. As such they offer an ideal target
for sections of the population that have become the enemies of Europe:
redundant civil servants who have been laid off in waves, entrepreneurs whose
businesses have been stifled by ailing banks, populist politicians with a gift
for exploiting anti-German sentiment, extreme right nationalists and hard left
anti-capitalists.
Not surprisingly, the lifestyles of both groups are
radically different. The task force staff, who liaise with civil society and
meet with social partners, live in private apartments or downtown hotel rooms
rented by the month. The troika officials, who come and go to negotiate with
government ministers, generally stay under police protection in suites at the
Athens Hilton.
For the Greek media, the Eurocrats are personified by three
names: Matthias Mors the Commission representative to the troika, Horst
Reichenbach the leader of the task force and Georgette Lalis, who is in charge
of the task force in Athens .
A major issue is that the German nationality of two of the
trio is grist to the mill for caricatures in the "Bismarck meets Socrates" genre.
For proof that this can be a problem, consider the
awkwardness prompted by the fact that the fiscal expert expedited by the
Commission just happens to be a Greek speaking German. "Don’t mention it
too often", suggest his colleagues, who are clearly pleased to have
already recovered 500 million euros in unpaid taxes in 2011.
Georgette Lalis, a Greek, senior European civil servant
appointed by Brussels to run the task force in Athens is the key link in
the chain. The affable, plain speaking 50-year-old has her offices on the
seventh floor of a mournful tower block in the residential neighbourhood of
Panormou. Her boss, Horst Reichenbach, travels with a bodyguard. She does
without. He tends to be evasive when answering questions. She prefers to be
direct.
From 2001 to 2004, she was given leave of absence by the EU
to take up a post at the head of the Land Registry in Athens ,
an institution whose labyrinthine records were implicated in massive tax
evasion which is now being reformed under the leadership of officials from the Netherlands :
"In Greece ,
Europe has run up against problems between the
Greek state and its citizens", she explains. One of her team chimes in:
"No one ever told the people that three generations would have to pay for
the sudden increase in wealth in the 1990s and the noughties. We are the ones
who have to present the bill."
The other difficulty for the Eurocrats charged with the
financial clean-up is that they have to contend with the consequences of the
Commission’s failings: in particular its reluctance to mobilise member states
to "discipline" Greece
when its public spending went overboard in the wake of the 2004 Olympics.
Behaving like politicians
Then there is the gullibility of the EU statistics agency,
Eurostat, which was beguiled by shameful Greek tricks to the point where
conspiracy theories have emerged to explain its behaviour, and the silence of
European Court of Justice President Vassilios Skouris, who at one point was
tipped to lead the current coalition government instead of former ECB President
Lucas Papademos. It is details like these that lent credence to allegations of
passive complicity.
Achilleas Mitsos is reluctant to take a position on this
issue. In his handsome apartment in Kolonaki, a neighbourhood of Athens that
used to be favoured by the wealthy before the nouveaux riches opted to live
close to the area’s beaches, the retired Director-General of Research skirts
around the issues that have been problematic for Greece since its inclusion in the
EU in 1981, and more controversially since its adoption of the euro.
"It is all very complicated,” remarks our host, who
speaks perfect French. “At meetings in Brussels, I often said that Greece
should be subject to more supervision but… in other fields, Greece was
definitely making progress," he intones, hesitating whenever he appears
about to breach an unstated law of silence.
Buoyed by the money received from Brussels and cheap loans from from financial
markets, the Greek “bubble” brought wealth to a certain section of the
population, and boosted the careers of the Greek elite. "The Greek
Eurocrats were the worst,” complains shoe importer Andreas. “They knew what was
happening but they didn’t dare speak out. Worse still, many of them were proud
to see little Greece make a
fool of Europe . They behaved like politicians,
while our politicians behaved like crooks."
And now? "We would love to see a Jacques Delors with
the courage to say to the Greeks: ‘ Your borders are the borders of Europe . You are the Europe ,
in which your elected leaders do not deserve to participate’", remarks an
EU official. But the Delors era is over. And José Manuel Barroso, the current
President of the European Commission, has not set foot in Athens since the start of the crisis.
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