The Greek Prime Minister, the conservative Kiriakos Mitsotakis, is in the eye of the storm after being accused of being behind a scandal of illegal tapping on the phones of politicians, journalists and businessmen, already known by the press as the "Greek Watergate" .
If in the summer it already caused a huge stir when it was revealed that opposition politicians and reporters had been victims of the Predator espionage program, now the tension is much greater after the critical daily Document has published a new list of 33 affected people who includes ministers of the current New Democracy Executive and members of their families.
It also includes the former right-wing prime minister Andonis Samaras, leader of the internal opposition in the Mitsotakis formation, as well as the current head of Foreign Affairs, Nikos Dendias, the ministers of Finance, Development, Labor and Tourism, or the businessman Vangelis Marinakis, owner of Olympiakos. Traces of this illegal spy program are found on all your devices, according to Document. The newspaper assures that it has obtained this list through two sources within the Greek intelligence services, which from the first day he took office, in 2019, report to the prime minister.
Mitsotakis has acknowledged in an interview with private television ANT1 that this espionage program, Predator, is used in Greece, although he has categorically denied that he or his government were behind all this, calling the accusations "slander" and "incredible lies." ”.
“Is there anyone in Greece who really believes that he was spying on the foreign minister and the finance minister?” he asked on television. "There is absolutely no evidence that this was happening and absolutely no connection to me personally," the prime minister repeated, accusing the director of the daily Document, Kostas Vaxevanis, of being a "national danger" and of working for the leftist former prime minister. Alexis Tsipras with a strategy to sink him "into the mud". Testifying before the Supreme Court, Vaxevanis was blunt, assuring that there is a "unique surveillance system that has Mitsotakis as a brain" and maintaining the existence of a "paranoid state" in Greece.
The Greek political climate has been poisoned by this issue for months. Everything exploded in the summer, when MEP Nikos Androulakis, leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok), denounced that he had been the victim of espionage attempts on his phone through the Predator program. Then, two journalists and another important politician in the opposition revealed that they too had suffered the same attacks. The Greek government acknowledged that the secret services had carried out surveillance activities with conventional methods against politicians and journalists but without using Predator, although they did not explain the reasons, citing reasons of national security. Then Mitsotakis said again that he had no record of these acts, which he considered wrong but legal, although his chief of staff and his nephew, Grigoris Dimitriadis, had to resign, as well as the head of the secret services. Since then, the scandal has snowballed, affecting not only politicians in the opposition, but also ministers from Mitsotakis's own party who, according to the Greek daily Ta Nea, "seem to have less good relations with each other." with the environment of the prime minister.
The noise is so great that a delegation from the PEGA commission of the European Parliament, in charge of investigating the espionage of politicians and journalists in the EU, has traveled to Greece for the matter. The visit ended last Friday, when Dutch Liberal Democrat MP Sophie in 't Veld said they were leaving with more questions than answers. She also pointed out that everything seems to indicate that the Intellexa company, which markets Predator services in Greece, did not act on its own but on the orders of someone "in the government environment." “We don't have solid evidence, because we don't have the necessary information. If the authorities decide to declassify the information, we would have it”, assured the MEP in Athens. And she sentenced: "There is always the presumption of innocence, but that does not mean that we are blind and deaf."
Syriza, the main opposition party, has demanded clarity from the Executive on the matter before the general elections scheduled for 2023, in addition to asking that the companies that own Predator be forced to reveal who their clients are in Greece. Tsipras's party is considering resorting to a motion of censure against Mitsotakis, who nevertheless enjoys a large majority in Parliament.
