Is Greece's government privatizing water?
Dear Member,
This is our weekly round-up from Greece.
The country celebrates its National Day, the beginning of the Greek Revolution on 25 March 1821, under a thick cloud of anger and grief over the train tragedy. It’s no time to celebrate. The government's continuing efforts for “damage control” end up in lies, to be quickly debunked, and gaslighting.
A bill that constitutes a decisive step toward water privatization was passed this week only with ND votes as the main opposition SYRIZA abstained. On the same day, a Top Administrative Court ruling was published. According to this, the government has to return water companies' stocks to the State. Giving these stocks away is against the constitution, the Court has ruled. Till this moment, not only has the government disobeyed the court, but they have also taken the next step towards water privatization.
Meta manager Artemis Seaford was hacked with spyware and wiretapped in Greece, according to a breaking NYT report. The disclosure is the first known case of an American citizen being targeted in a European Union country by surveillance technology. Until these lines were written, the Greek government had made no statement on the issue. SYRIZA tabled a relevant Parliamentary question.
“Sacrificing” youngsters to make railways better?
“The best way to vindicate the sacrifice of these children [who died in the train crash] is to ensure that what happened in Tempi will never happen again in our country”: This is what Greek PM Mitsotakis stated (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) from Maroussi area in Athens, where he spoke to citizens for the first time after the horrific train collision on 28 February 2023.
The statement triggered outrage from citizens but also from opposition parties (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). The PM “does not realize his responsibility at all,” SYRIZA spokeswoman Popi Tsapanidou stated. PASOK said the PM “showed how unremorsefully he exercises his power by calling the tragic death of 57 people ‘sacrifice.’” “It was not a sacrifice. It was murder,” DiEM25 spokesman Kritharidis stated.
The government has embarked on a ‘damage control’ campaign. On Tuesday, the PM gave an interview with Stavros Theodorakis. Note that Theodorakis was a journalist, then became head of the neoliberal political party ‘To Potami’, and after the latter was dissolved, he returned to journalism.
The interview was videotaped, not live. The journalist effectively left Mitsotakis completely unchallenged.
During the interview, the PM announced the elections would be in May without specifying the date.
These are two telling quotes from the interview:
→ “We, and me personally, courageously undertook the corresponding responsibility, and I said, ‘It’s all of us to blame.’ Why is it so difficult, Mr. Theodorakis, for everybody to say this? (...) Can’t we finally agree that we all have a share of the responsibility? The corresponding share for our years in office?”
→ Then, the interviewer asked the PM questions victims and relatives of the victims had sent. Evdokia Tsagkli, one of the young women on the train who has been wounded, asked (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)Mitsotakis: “If I was your daughter, Mr. PM, and after what happened to me was telling you that I am afraid and I want to move to another country, what would you advise me?” “I would tell Evdokia, who is probably a bit older than my old daughter, that she has every reason to be angry, afraid, and worried. It can't be the case today for a young person to enter a train and feel that something so tragic can happen to him/her. I would tell her she should insist, after all. And she must also make an effort to change this country.”
Soon Greek Twitter was trending with #Evdokia_make_an effort (#Vale_Plati_Evdokia), with users expressing their anger that a victim was asked to share responsibility for the destitute state of the railway.
In another incident, alternate Transportation Minister Michalis Papadopoulos visited on Monday evening the Larissa train station (that is the station where the fatal human mistake happened with the station master putting the train on the opposite rail).
“We won’t allow anyone, inside or outside the Parliament, to misinform Greek society. We are here today to show that this panel, the local tele-administration system, is operating and is operating on the night of the fatal accident. Unfortunately, it wasn’t used,” the Minister claimed (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) in front of the TV cameras.
But a Larissa station employee standing next to the Minister was a catapult (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre).
Employee: “At this moment, we have a route plan from the entrance to the station's exit,” he said.
“Is this tele-administration?” a journalist asked.
E: “This is not tele-administration; it is local management.
J: “It is not tele-administration.”
E: “There is currently no tele-administration; it's a local control board.
J: “Was there tele-administration on the night of the accident?”
E: “There is a local control board. It ‘sees’ some 8 km.”
J: “If tele-administration existed, how far would it see?”
E: “Until Plati (112 km from Larissa). Tele-administration stopped operating in July 2019. From 2019 till today, no tele-administration exists. Only this local control board.”
As the journalist kept asking questions and the railway employee kept giving inconvenient answers to the Minister, the Minister waved to a person behind him. Immediately this person told the employee (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), “Enough. It’s finished here,” he ordered him to stop talking.
This happened in front of live TV cameras. Imagine what happens behind them.
Meanwhile, more details about the railway system deficiencies are coming to light.
Rail Regulatory Authority president Ioanna Tsiaparikou reported (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) that they had warned the Ministry and were fully aware of the railway’s serious safety issues. They last updated them four days before the accident.
Very importantly, it was reported (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) this week that the Greek National Transparency Authority auditor investigating railway contract 717, the contract for installing signaling and tele-administration, was replaced a few months before she submitted her report. Her file was removed from her, and she resigned. Her report appears to have identified criminal liability for the non-implementation of the contract. The contract was signed in 2014 and remains unfinished today.
The final report did not bear her signature, although she was head of the investigation for at least two years. Two other investigators signed it but did not identify criminal liability for not finishing the project.
Based on the final report's conclusions, which were limited to observations and proposals, the Financial Prosecutor who had ordered it put the case to file.
Then the Tempi train collision happened. Along came the horrific realization that had the electronic systems been installed, the accident would have been avoided. There is an ongoing investigation by Greek and European authorities to investigate whether European funds have been misappropriated.
How can there not be criminal liability, then?
Despite all this, trains have been back in operation this week. With no electronic security system in place. With the same preconditions for an accident waiting to happen.
Breaching the Constitution to Privatise Water
The water privatization bill was finally passed (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) on Wednesday with ND voting and SYRIZA abstaining. With this bill, the Ministry of Environment and Energy changed the name of the Energy Regulatory Authority to ‘Regulatory Authority for Sewage, Energy and Waters’, widening its responsibilities to include water politics.
How is this directly connected to water privatization?
Well, regulatory authorities worldwide are connected with specific markets - energy being the most prominent example. So, why is such an authority needed to regulate water politics? This law is widely considered the decisive step toward water privatization.
More so since it includes clauses like Article 11, which provides for the new Authority to “monitor and supervise the proper implementation of the contracts which concede water services to third parties” and that it “certifies water services providers.”
Water privatization breaches Greece’s Top Administrative Court StE ruling. In February 2022, StE issued a landmark decision (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), entrenching public control over water and demanding that water companies’ EYDAP-EYATH stocks which had been transferred to the Growth fund (the Fund where state property ends up before it is sold to ‘investors’) in 2016, be returned to the State. They ruled this transfer was unconstitutional.
What did the ND government do? They annulled StE’s decision (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre): In July 2022, they voted a bill according to which most of the water company’s stocks remain with the Growth Fund and “it is not to be returned or conceded.” At the same time, the government included a clause aiming to disarm those seeking to file a complaint with StE again in this bill. EYDAP and EYATH employees resorted to the Committee tasked to decide whether judicial and political power conforms with the Court’s decisions.
The Committee issued two decisions (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) in 2023, ruling that the government did not comply with the Court’s decisions, according to which transferring EYDAP and EYATH stocks to the Growth Fund is against the constitution and calling on them to undertake all necessary action to return them to the state within six months at the latest.
These decisions were published (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) the day the Parliament discussed the bill for subsuming water services to a “Regulatory Authority.”
It is worth noting that the Parliament’s Scientific Council, in a report concerning the new law, noted (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), among others, that “a question arises whether and to what extent the responsibilities transferred to the Regulatory Authority are under StE’s rulings.”
The Administrative Judges Union and ex-StE president Maria Karamanov have taken a stance against (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) the bill, documenting it is anti-constitutional.
DiEM 25 filed a request (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) with the President of Democracy, asking her to take a stance on the bill. “We call to the President, more so since she has served as StE president in the past, to take action on what should have been self-evident: to respect the Top Courts decisions, that is something the government did not do, and send back the bill to the Parliament, as Constitution Article 42 provides for. Water is a Public Good.”
US-Greek citizen under ‘Greek surveillance’ radar
“Meta Manager Was Hacked With Spyware and Wiretapped in Greece (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)”: New York Times dropped a reporting ‘bomb’ under this title this week.
What has happened? “Artemis Seaford, a dual U.S.-Greek national, was targeted with a cyberespionage tool while also under a wiretap by the Greek spy agency in a case that shows the spread of illicit snooping in Europe,” the report noted. “The disclosure is the first known case of an American citizen being targeted in a European Union country by the advanced snooping technology, the use of which has been the subject of a widening scandal in Greece,” it was added.
“The evidence suggests that my hacking with Predator was based on private information most likely obtained through state intelligence wiretapping,” Artemis Seaford tweeted (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). She claimed she had been infected after she got the link to confirm her Covid vaccination. “I hope this story will encourage other victims of spyware abuse to speak out. There are more of us out there, and our stories should be neither instrumentalized nor silenced. We deserve better. Ultimately, we need our governments and EU bodies to protect us,” she concluded.
According to the NYT, on 17 March, Ms. Seaford filed a lawsuit against anyone responsible for the hack in Athens. The suit compels prosecutors to open an investigation. Ms. Seaford also filed a request with the Greek Authority for the Protection of the Privacy of Telecommunications, an independent constitutional watchdog, asking them to determine whether the Greek national intelligence service, known as the EYP, had wiretapped her phone.
Until these lines were written, the Greek government had made no official explanatory statement on the NYT report. They just denied involvement: "I have categorically said both personally and as a government many, many times that anything related to illegal software has nothing to do with any official Greek authority," government spokesman Yannis Economou said on Monday, March 20, speaking on MEGA channel's main newscast.
The case was brought to Parliament on Friday as 46 main opposition SYRIZA MPs tabled a relevant Parliamentary question (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre). The MPs ask whether the government and Digital Governance Minister intend “to explain clearly to Ms. Seaford's double surveillance by EYP and Predator due to her vaccination data leakage.”
The MPs emphasize that SYRIZA MP Ragkousis denounced in Parliament two months ago that a citizen had been wiretapped through an infected SMS containing vaccination info. They, therefore, ask what actions had been undertaken to investigate this case.
There is evidence “of a joint National Intelligence Service-Predator surveillance center,” Inside Story reported (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) on Friday. “The coincidences in the surveillance cases of Koukakis, Androulakis, and Seaford, as well as the sequence of events, clearly point in one direction: the state.”
Read
A Greek photojournalist has lost 55% of his hearing after a police attack (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) with a stun grenade on 16 March during anti-government protests in Athens (In Greek)
US State Department 2022 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Greece (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre): A damning report
Press freedom is under attack in Europe. Greece is Exhibit A (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Why I joined the demonstrations spurred by the rail disaster (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Ten worst fires destroyed 280,000 hectares in 20 years (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Greek shipping still coming to terms with sale of whale lender (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Where Time Flies: The Historic Cinemas of Athens (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) - The Greek capital is still home to an impressive number of old cinemas - beloved silver screens that have survived for up to a century (Update: Ideal historic cinema is still threatened by real estate to be demolished)
Greece condemned over Thessaloniki pollution (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
Greek workers protest outside French Embassy in Athens (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre)
That’s all for this week,
We wish you a good one and stay safe!
The AL team.
