Debate Over Whereabouts of a List Highlight Greek Political Divide

By RACHEL DONADIO

ATHENS — Can a memory stick bring down a political order? That is the question in Greece, where a tragicomic debate over what became of a list of nearly 2,000 Greeks with Swiss bank accounts is rapidly turning into a full-blown political crisis that is imperiling Greece’s fragile coalition government at a crucial time.

d one of his predecessors said last month that the list was missing — and another former finance minister subsequently said he had belatedly handed it over to the authorities — the story was seen as an almost laughable caper. But amid other high-profile corruption investigations that have opened in recent weeks, the story quickly assumed a darker cast. On Thursday, a former deputy interior minister — who according to the Greek news media was under investigation for corruption himself — was found dead in what appears to have been a suicide.

As the coalition government of Prime Minister Antonis Samaras struggles to agree on a package of austerity measures to secure the foreign financing the country needs to stay afloat — and ahead of the first visit to Athens by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany since the debt crisis began, expected on Tuesday — the corruption investigations are seen less as a belated housekeeping effort than as a gloves-off fight, with politicians breaking allegiances in a destabilizing climate of suspicion and even

blackmail.

“What we see unfolding in the political system is a tragedy with elements of low comedy,” said Pantelis Boukalas, a columnist for the newspaper Kathimerini.

Today, the same people singled out in the investigations are in the parties that form the pillars of Mr. Samaras’s government — a government blessed and supported by European leaders — and it remains to be seen how much self-examination, let alone how many criminal charges, it will take before the entire structure collapses.

As the investigations gain momentum, the relationship between the Socialists and New Democracy, Mr. Samaras’s party, “is that of the scorpion and the frog,” Mr. Boukalas said.

“It’s in their nature for one to sting the other until they sink together,” he said.

“They might be forced allies now, but each other’s value is based on the devaluation of the other,” he added. “However, if the Socialists completely fall apart, there goes the government; New Democracy and Democratic Left alone cannot hold it together,” referring to a smaller third party in the coalition.

The investigations have also revealed the close ties between Greece’s political establishment and its oligarchs and business elite. There is growing public outrage that no Greek government wanted to touch the infamous list of 1,991 Greeks with accounts at a branch of the global bank HSBC in Geneva that the French government gave Greece in 2010 to crack down on tax evasion.

After Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras told The Financial Times last month that the list appeared to have gone missing in the Finance Ministry, one of his predecessors, George Papaconstantinou, gave an interview on Greek television saying that he had received the list in late 2010 from Christine Lagarde, then the French finance minister and now the managing director of the International Monetary Fund. He said he had given a handful of names from the list to the chief of Greece’s financial crimes unit in early 2011 and the full list to that official’s successor, Ioannis Diotis, in June of that year.

Speaking to Parliament’s ethics committee last week, Mr. Diotis said he had received a memory stick with the names from Mr. Papaconstantinou in June 2011, the month that the finance minister left office. The financial crimes investigator said that he had passed the list to Mr. Papaconstantinou’s successor, Evangelos Venizelos, the current Socialist leader, but that Mr. Venizelos had not instructed him to investigate it.

Mr. Diotis also suggested to the parliamentary committee that the list appeared to have been obtained illegally and might not have been usable as the basis for an investigation.

On Monday, the committee said it would summon the current and three former finance ministers to testify about the list.

In a television interview last week, a furious Mr. Venizelos said he had handed the memory stick to Mr. Samaras when he realized that no investigative agencies had a copy. On Monday, he said he had never received the list from Mr. Papaconstantinou.

Beyond the memory stick’s contents, the claims and counterclaims reveal a poisonous atmosphere in which party members no longer support one another.

“It is a difficult period, the most difficult we’ve had since the war, and you find very few exemplary figures in public life,” said Thanos Veremis, a professor and a co-author of a history of modern Greece. “There’s also fear — fear that they will be accused of this, that or the other — so they behave accordingly.”

That much was clear last month when the Greek news media published a list of 36 politicians who were ostensibly under investigation on corruption charges. It included the speaker of Parliament, who temporarily stepped down on Sept. 24, and several former ministers and mayors. It was also believed to include Leonidas Tzanis, 57, a Socialist politician and former deputy minister. Mr. Tzanis’s wife found him dead in the basement of their house, where he had apparently hanged himself on Thursday, days before he was expected to testify to the authorities, the Greek news media reported.

Greece’s financial crimes unit has not confirmed the existence of the list but has not denied that it is investigating politicians for corruption. It did not respond to requests for comment.

In a separate investigation, the authorities are examining a list of 54,000 people who transferred nearly $29 billion abroad since 2009 and, in 15,000 cases, declared an income significantly smaller than the amount found in the foreign accounts.

After 40 years in which the Socialists and New Democracy alternated rule before seeing their traditional support drop by half, punished by austerity-weary voters in elections last spring, analysts said the investigations could easily turn into the kind of bribery scandal that brought down Italy’s political establishment in the early 1990s, leaving a vacuum eventually filled by Silvio Berlusconi.

But in Greece, it remains to be seen what new political forces might emerge from the remnants of the mainstream parties. The political landscape has already been radically transformed by the debt crisis and three years of austerity, during which the gross domestic product has dropped 25 percent and unemployment has hit 50 percent for young people and 25 percent over all.

In last spring’s elections, the neo-Nazi party, Golden Dawn, a growing antipolitical force that preys on fears of illegal immigration and has accused the mainstream parties of corruption, earned seats in Parliament. Last week during a parliamentary session, members of Golden Dawn shouted at their Socialist colleagues, calling them thieves who had stolen from the country for 20 years.

The main opposition party, the leftist Syriza, whose members range from unreconstructed Maoists to mainstream European social democrats, is finding its footing after placing second in the elections.

Mr. Boukalas, the political columnist, said that Greek politicians accused of corruption used to stay out of the public eye for a time before re-emerging, wagging their fingers at others as a way to “regain their virginity.” With the old leadership in disarray, that strategy no longer worked, he said.

“There is this lake in Argos where Hera would take a swim after every copulation session with Zeus, so she would always be a virgin,” Mr. Boukalas said. “Our politicians are out of luck because this lake doesn’t exist anymore. It was dried up in a public works project.”

Dimitris Bounias and Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting.
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