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A number-cruncher told the truth. He became his country's public enemy No. 1.
Source: Washington Post
A number-cruncher told the truth. He became his country’s public enemy No. 1.
By Catherine Rampell
Columnist
1/2/2020, 6:20:13 p.m.
For nearly a decade, on and off, Andreas Georgiou has been Greece’s Public Enemy No. 1.
The government has brought a relentless series of criminal prosecutions against him. His countrymen have sought their own vengeance by hacking his emails, dragging him into court, even threatening his life. His lawyers in Greece are now preparing for his latest trial, which begins this month; Georgiou himself will watch from the United States, where he lives in a sort of self-imposed exile.
Georgiou is not a mobster. He’s not a hit man or a spy. He’s a statistician. And the sin at the heart of his supposed “crimes” was publishing correct budget numbers.
For decades, the term “Greek statistics” had been a punchline. Official data were massaged so that the government could claim it was meeting European Union fiscal commitments and retain access to international capital markets. The Greek statistical service, which was controlled by whatever party held power, had taken to reverse-engineering its official budget data. That is, it would choose a final number at the outset and then backfill the assumptions necessary to produce that result. (This technique is not unique to the Greek government, of course.)
To give you a sense of the brazenness of this fiscal fraud: The 2009 Greek budget deficit was initially forecast to be just 3.7 percent of the country’s economy. If true, this would have been astonishingly low. Not only because it followed a once-in-a-century, economy-and-budget-shredding global financial crisis; it also would have meant that Greece — a fiscal basket case that has been in default half of the years since it achieved independence — somehow had one of the tiniest budget deficits in Europe.
It turned out that this official number was off, by a factor of four. ...
-snip-
By Catherine Rampell
Columnist
1/2/2020, 6:20:13 p.m.
For nearly a decade, on and off, Andreas Georgiou has been Greece’s Public Enemy No. 1.
The government has brought a relentless series of criminal prosecutions against him. His countrymen have sought their own vengeance by hacking his emails, dragging him into court, even threatening his life. His lawyers in Greece are now preparing for his latest trial, which begins this month; Georgiou himself will watch from the United States, where he lives in a sort of self-imposed exile.
Georgiou is not a mobster. He’s not a hit man or a spy. He’s a statistician. And the sin at the heart of his supposed “crimes” was publishing correct budget numbers.
For decades, the term “Greek statistics” had been a punchline. Official data were massaged so that the government could claim it was meeting European Union fiscal commitments and retain access to international capital markets. The Greek statistical service, which was controlled by whatever party held power, had taken to reverse-engineering its official budget data. That is, it would choose a final number at the outset and then backfill the assumptions necessary to produce that result. (This technique is not unique to the Greek government, of course.)
To give you a sense of the brazenness of this fiscal fraud: The 2009 Greek budget deficit was initially forecast to be just 3.7 percent of the country’s economy. If true, this would have been astonishingly low. Not only because it followed a once-in-a-century, economy-and-budget-shredding global financial crisis; it also would have meant that Greece — a fiscal basket case that has been in default half of the years since it achieved independence — somehow had one of the tiniest budget deficits in Europe.
It turned out that this official number was off, by a factor of four. ...
-snip-
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/a-number-cruncher-told-the-truth-he-became-his-countrys-public-enemy-no-1/2020/01/02/06a484c4-2d8e-11ea-bcd4-24597950008f_story.html
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