Andreas Georgiou (statistician)

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Andreas Georgiou

Andreas Georgiou ( Greek Ανδρέας Γεωργίου , * 1960 in Patras ) is a Greek economist. On August 2, 2010, he became President of the Greek statistical agency ELSTAT . On August 2, 2015, he surprisingly resigned from his position with immediate effect. He will not remain in office on a provisional basis.

In July 2016, the Areopagus (highest court of civil and criminal justice in Greece) decided that Georgiou had to answer for violating the “national interest”. In June 2018, he was sentenced by the Areopagus to two years in prison, suspended. No appeal is possible against the judgment; the Georgiou case could still concern the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

biography

Georgiou graduated from Athens College and studied at Amherst College in USA to a bachelor's degree . He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan , majoring in Monetary Theory and International Trade and Finance.

From 1989 to July 2010 he worked for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He has led missions for the preparation, negotiation and monitoring of IMF programs in numerous countries. From March 2004 to July 2010 he was Deputy Head of Statistics at the IMF. He taught economics at the University of Michigan and as a visiting professor at the Bratislava University of Economics ( Bratislava , Slovakia).

President of ELSTAT and time thereafter

On June 29, 2010 Georgiou was appointed President of the new independent Greek statistical agency (ELSTAT) by the Greek Parliament . The background to the dissolution of the previous statistical office ESYE and the re-establishment of ELSTAT was that an analysis by Eurostat had revealed the image of a veritable counterfeiting workshop, which had concealed the level of the Greek public deficit and ignored numerous EU rules. The EU Commission judged in a report that the Greek statistical office ESYE did not provide reliable data because it was at the helm of politics. As long as this weakness is not remedied, the reliability of the data remains questionable. Georgiou corrected the budget deficit for 2009 to 15.4 percent after taking office in August 2010. Previously, this was given as 3.9 percent.

Georgiou, who had given up his well-paid post at the IMF to work in his home country and forfeited acquired pension rights, worked hard on reforming the Greek statistical agency. In the attempt to restore the credibility of Greek statistics through realistic data, he encountered resistance in ELSTAT from the start. The management committee was largely re-appointed after violent disputes. Allegations by a resigned employee that Georgiou presented the Greek public deficit excessively high according to the requirements of the EU and the IMF, led to public prosecutor investigations and revived conspiracy theories circulating in Greece that the EU - in particular the German government - and the IMF had deliberately brought about the Greek financial crisis, to submit the country to their austerity dictates. In February 2013, prosecutors brought charges against Georgiou of embezzlement.

In March 2015 - the ND-PASOK coalition government under Andonis Samaras , which ruled from 2012 to January 2015, had since been voted out of office and replaced by the Tsipras government - Georgiou was interrogated again. In 2015, Georgiou, exasperated by the fierce criticism in Greece, gave up his head office at the statistics agency and went back to the USA, where he held a small visiting professorship, but was otherwise unemployed.

Because Georgiou had publicly called the statistics of his authority at the time "fraudulent", he was sentenced in March 2017 by an appeals court to 12 months in prison. His statement was defamatory.

The prosecution of Georgiou received critical comments in the media.

In November 2017, a court in Athens sentenced Georgiou: although he had not said anything untrue, he was not allowed to spread the statements in a press release. Georgiou had asked in a press release in 2014 why he was being charged with correct statistics, while those responsible for incorrect data on Greece's budget deficits up to 2009 were not being investigated. The court said that a former head of the statistical office had suffered "simple defamation" as a result; it sentenced Georgiou to 10,000 euros in damages . Georgiou announced that they would appeal. In June 2018, after several appeals, he was finally sentenced by the Greek Supreme Court to two years suspended prison sentence. The International Statistical Institute described the judgment as "destructive" to Greece's credibility.

International support for Georgiou

The American Statistical Association has issued a letter condemning the prosecution and calling on the Greek authorities to stop the prosecution against Georgiou and other Elstat officials. The letter was also signed by nine Nobel Prize winners in economics and forty statistical organizations.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ a b [Andreas Georgiou (statistician) www.statistics.gr] (undated)
  2. ↑ sueddeutsche.de August 3, 2015: Athens Stock Exchange reopens - and crashes
  3. ↑ Kathimerini August 2, 2015: Αποχωρεί από την ΕΛΣΤΑΤ μετά τη λήξη της θητείας του ο Ανδρέας Γεωργίου
  4. ↑ Aktenzeichen 1331/2016 ( Supreme Court refers Andreas Georgiou with felony charges (August 2, 2016))
  5. ↑ a b c sueddeutsche.de June 11, 2018 Greek chief statistician convicted - for honesty
  6. ^ Greece: Master of creative bookkeeping. In: FAZ.net . February 4, 2010, accessed May 5, 2010 .
  7. ^ Greece: Statistics Sirtaki. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . January 12, 2009, accessed May 5, 2010 .
  8. ↑ The honest is the stupid , Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, June 13, 2018, p. 5
  9. ^ Christiane Schlötzer : Greece's long fight against corruption paydays in Athens. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . October 27, 2011, accessed June 3, 2015 .
  10. ↑ Tobias Piller : Manipulation allegations: dispute over the budget data of Greece. In: FAZ. December 1, 2011, accessed June 3, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Manipulation allegations: Greek chief statistician must face charges. In: Spiegel Online . January 22, 2013, accessed June 3, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Christiane Schlötzer: Dangerously honest. Andreas Georgiou cleared up with Greek statistics lies - he is charged for this. In: sueddeutsche.de. February 13, 2013, accessed June 3, 2015 .
  13. ↑ wsj.com March 22, 2015: Greeks Investigate Statistics Chief Over Deficit Figure
  14. ↑ The honest is the stupid, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, June 13, 2018, p. 5
  15. ^ FAZ March 29, 2017 / Tobias Piller: prison sentence for Greek chief statistician
  16. ↑ heise.de August 15, 2017: Is the Greek judiciary controlled by the government?
  17. ↑ FAZ.net / Philip Plickert November 12, 2017: Penalty for former chief statistician of Greece
  18. ↑ FAZ.net: Outrage over punishment for Greek chief statisticians
  19. ↑ sueddeutsche.de June 11, 2018 [1]
  20. ↑ The honest is the stupid, Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung, June 13, 2018, p. 5
  21. ↑ FAZ.net January 12, 2018: Nobel Prize winners support Greek statisticians
personal data
SURNAME Georgiou, Andreas
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Γεωργίου, Ανδρέας
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greek economist, President of the Greek Statistical Office
DATE OF BIRTH 1960
PLACE OF BIRTH Patras