Greece’s top court has fully acquitted the former president of the country’s statistics agency ELSTAT, Andreas Georgiou, for alleged breach of duty, ending a 15-year judicial ordeal that was repeatedly denounced by international statistics bodies.
The ruling refers to Georgiou’s decision to notify Eurostat of the revised fiscal data for the period 2006-09 in November 2010 on 10 November 2010, without seeking the approval of ELSTAT’s board. The revised data showed that Greece’s financial situation was much more dire than had been reported.
Georgiou had initially been sentenced to two years in prison with a three-year suspension by a lower court.
His defense had argued that his conviction goes against the Code of Practice for European Statistics, which explicitly states that the head of the statistical office has “sole responsibility” for the compilation and publication of statistical data, which are not subject to a vote – a rule that safeguards the reliability of EU statistics and their protection from political interference.
In a separate but closely linked case, Georgiou was also accused of artificially inflating the deficit figures, allegedly as part of a plot to bring severe austerity to Greece, for which he was acquitted in repeated trials.
