Toxic, explosive, dirty and foul smelling. These are just a few of the adjectives being used in the Greek press to describe the political situation in the country following the allegation made yesterday by the Independent Greeks (ANEL) of an attempt to bribe one of the party’s MPs.
The bombshell has touched off a political firestorm laden, in roughly equal measure, with high drama and high farce.
The allegation – as well as the way it was made – can only be described as bizarre and it will take some time to disentangle what exactly has taken place. However time is exactly what is in short supply, and political developments are very much in danger of outpacing attempts to shed light on the murky details of the story.
At this point only one thing is certain: that there is a scandal afoot. What remains to be seen is whether that scandal is over an attempt to bribe an MP, or unfounded allegations made by a grossly irresponsible political party.
In an effort to provide some degree of clarity, here is an early attempt to put down what we know about the case and where it fits in to the wider political scene.
The Background
The alleged bribery takes place as parliament prepares for the final two rounds of voting for the election of a president of the republic. By the third round of voting (on December 29th) the government will need at least 180 yes votes for its candidate, Stavros Dimas, in order to elect him as the new head of state. Any fewer and snap elections will be triggered. In the first round of elections (which took place on Wednesday) only 160 MPs voted in favour of the candidate.
It will be difficult, if not impossible, for the government to garner the additional 20 votes it requires. The only likely sources for these votes are from the pool of independent MPs, and the two opposition parties ANEL and Democratic Left (DIMAR). The line of both parties is to oppose the election of a new president and take the country to elections.
In the event that snap elections are ultimately triggered the anti-memorandum party SYRIZA is expected to win. This has created a broad sense of uncertainty over the future of Greece’s financing as the party has pledged to reject many of the demands of the country’s lenders.
The allegations
Amid this uncertain and fluid political situation, yesterday an MP for ANEL, Pavlos Haikalis, alleged that he had been offered 2-3 million euros in cash, loan settlements and advertising contracts to vote in favor of the government’s presidential candidate. He also claimed to have video evidence backing up his claim. Predictably the bombshell brought the already turbulent political waters to boiling point. The ANEL leader, Panos Kammenos, supported Haikalis’s claims.
How the allegations were made – two comedians and a showman take the stage
Even if the explosive claims are true, the way they were handled by ANEL only served to muddy the waters and to turn the alleged scandal into a full-blown circus from the outset.
To begin with, the initial allegation was not made by a member of ANEL but by Lakis Lazopoulos, a comedian and political satirist with ties to SYRIZA. He dropped the first bombshell on a breakfast news program where he made reference to the recording of the attempt to bribe the MP. “I have heard and seen the material. Soon you will see it too,” he said. Lazopoulos also added he believed another MP had accepted such a bribe.
The allegation was immediately confirmed by Haikalis who by phone to the same show, who said it was true and he had a recording.
A short while later Haikalis and Panos Kammenos held a press conference where they laid out the allegations. Brandishing a DVD disk Panos Kammenos said that MP Haikalis had had a meeting on the 6th of December that lasted for over an hour with someone he named as the "intermediary" at the Hotel Plaza. The meeting was recorded using a device that looked like a watch. On that same evening Haikalis informed the prosecutor of the bribery attempt and turned over the original material (of which ANEL kept copies).
During a second meeting, the "intermediary" told the MP he could receive 700,000 euros in cash and gold. That meeting was also recorded and the prosecutor once again informed. At this point a sting operation was put in place with police seeking to arrest the intermediary.
However the third meeting did not take place eventually as the intermediary cancelled it two minutes before the appointment, apparently after realizing or being informed that he was being set up.
According to Kammenos, the prosecutor has all of the recordings and that ANEL had also kept copies. He urged the authorities to release the material, threatening that if they did not do so, then he would.
“If the government backs down and conceals i will bear the cost of publicizing it myself, assuming any risk of criminal liability." (In Greece it is a crime to make and release such secret recordings.)
Giorgos Apostolopoulos
It was subsequently revealed that the man who Haikalis met with was one Giorgos Apostolopoulos, a financial consultant who previously advised the governments of Geroge Papandreou and Antonis Samaras.
Here the situation becomes even more convoluted as Apostolopoulos is no stranger to the Independent Greeks party. After Mr Kammenos left New Democracy to found his party, Apostolopoulos followed him, providing him with financial advice. He also penned anti-austerity blog posts under the name ‘Deucalion’ and testified in a trial about the transactions involving credit default swaps (CDS) where individuals bet on Greece’s default. Last year Panos Kammenos was convicted of slander after accusing Andreas Papandreou (George Papandreou’s brother) of profiting from CDS deals.
According to Kammenos, in the spring of 2013, Apostolopoulos informed him that he was taking up a position at the Bank of Piraeus. Kammenos implied that at that point the two had parted ways.
However today in parliament, a former MP of ANEL, Chrysoula Giatagana, claimed that Apostolopoulos was still working with Kammenos, stating that in October she had been contacted by Apostolopoulos and asked to rejoin the party – a request which she refused. She even called upon the judicial authorities to check her phone records to confirm her claim.
While she did not take a definitive position on the alleged bribery scandal she left open the possibility that the scandal had been set up by Kammenos, working with Apostolopoulos.
(UPDATE: Ms Giatagiana has since backtracked somewhat, issuing a new statement stressing that she never said that Mr Apostolopoulos was currently working with Panos Kammenos and stressing that she did not believe the Haikalis allegations had been set up. Ms Giatagana issued the new statement after being threatened with legal action from ANEL.)
For his part, Apostolopoulos has said that he is ‘surprised and angry’ at the accusations writing in a statement, "I watch with surprise and anger as the media implicate me in political vendettas, motivated by fraudulent party interests. This is a theatrical police scenario starring an experienced comic actor and director and a frantic showman political leader… I’m available to judicial authorities for the restoration of truth and reality. Everything will be revealed, without editing, stitching and machinations."
(UPDATE: Mr Apostolopoulos has since appeared before prosecutors arguing that it was he who was attempting to trap the MP into accepting a bribe to prove he was untrustworthy.)
The recording
An edited recording of one of the meetings between Haikalis and Apostolopoulos has since been leaked to the press.
While the conversation heard in the video is indeed damning and confirms much of what Kammenos and Haikalis have maintained, there are questions about how it has been edited. Indeed it is not even clear if Apostolopoulos and Haikalis - whose mouths are never seen in the video (indeed Apostolopoulos has his back turned the entire time) are even the sources of the accompanying audio which appears out of sync at times.
That editing was performed by Lakis Lazopoulos’s team. Haikalis said that he had given the material to Lazopoulos to ‘clean-up’ because he trusted the comedian. However Lazopoulos is far from a politically neutral party and his involvement only serves to raise further questions over ANEL’s handling of the situation.
The muted delight of SYRIZA
The opposition party has not exactly sought to keep its distance from the scandal, with Alexis Tsipras calling the allegation from Haikalis ‘serious’. While he said that he needed to see the evidence before coming to a conclusion he added, “We have stated for a while that a slippery path is being followed, a path of manipulations and pressure because there is an attempt to square the circle,” over the government’s efforts to find 180 MPs which it does not have.
Similarly other SYRIZA officials have given statements that are in effect knowing nods when asked to comment on Haikalis’s bribery allegations.
The government responds
In response to the allegations Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has taken the unusual step of filing charges against Haikalis.
"It is absolute slander and wretchedness at their highest. The prime minister is immediately filing a lawsuit and requests the intervention of the prosecuting authorities," a press release from the prime minister’s office announced on Friday night.
According to sources close to the PM, he is enraged and is of the view that the scandal proves the collusion between SYRIZA and ANEL at a high level. He said that they had a common strategy to prevent the election of a new president at all costs, which he called ‘hooliganism’ and which was damaging the country.
The party that cried wolf?
Finally one should note that this is not the first time that ANEL (or SYRIZA for that matter) has alleged a plot to bribe MPs over the election of the president of the republic.
This is also far from out of character for Panos Kammenos who rarely has come across a conspiracy theory he didn’t like – refusing, for example in the past, to rule out the possibility that Greeks are being sprayed by mind-control substances.
In late November another Independent Greeks MP, Stavroula Xoulidou, alleged that she had been approached with a multi-million euro offer to change her vote via.. Facebook.
As TheTOC had reported then, “While there remains the possibility that there was indeed a nefarious ring set up to bribe MPs to vote for a new head of state (and one that inexplicably used Facebook to conduct its shady business), there is also the distinct possibility that the whole case is a farce, with the leadership of the Independent Greeks mistaking hearsay as damning evidence of an intricate plot against them. And then spinning it into a public fiasco, which only lends weight to foreign whispers that perhaps the Greek political class is less than serious.’
Whatever the outcome of the investigations into the Haikalis and Xoulidou allegations, what is certain is that those foreign whispers will have only gotten louder.
In short, either there has been a crass attempt to overtly buy MP's votes in a conspiracy whose most stunning feature is it's lack of sophistication, or an even uglier game is being played at the expense of the country.
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