International

Finance Minister and former energy minister Berat Albayrak, Tayyip Erdogan’s son-in-law, outlined Ankara’s plans for oil and gas exploration both in the Mediterranean, where Turkey is challenging Cyprus’ sovereignty and drilling rights in its own EEZ, and in the Black Sea.

That morning, MBS personally called you. He asked you to return to the kingdom – “If you come back, we’ll let bygones be bygones,” he may have promised you. You flatly rejected his offer – “Does he think I’m a fool?” you wondered. Then you went straight into the mouth of the beast.

Everyone’s stance towards the pension problem was problematic. There were infinite warnings from the early 1990s about the impending “end of pensions”.

“There is a prevailing climate among referees that if you displease Olympiacos, you won’t get ahead. That is what referees believe. Olympiacos controls three or four teams in the Super League, and those are favoured by referees,” Vellis had said.

Varoufakis reiterated the claim in his book on his tenure as finance minister, Adults in the Room, that Soros in June, 2015, “picked up the phone to ask Tsipras to sack me”.

Police sources said that the incident is unrelated to yesterday’s killing of an ethnic Greek Albanian citizen by Albanian Special Forces in the village of Bularat.

Despite the periodic revelations and the often painful consequences for those implicated, phenomena of corruption and bribery persist at the sinful Defence Ministry.

Any formal decision on changes to the Greek budget, including the cancellation of pension cuts, would be expected at the December Eurogroup.

'There is no advice that we would get from Greece with regard to the delimitation techniques within the framework of international law,' the Turkish foreign ministry said in a statement today.

Representatives of the civil service believe that the wage hikes are of a pre-electoral, and trade unionists nature, as the increases are being offered only to newer public servants.

'He [Kammenos] spoke of secret funds. He also said that Soros is funding the government to buy off foreigners [to pass the Greece-FYROM Prespa Agreement],' ex-foreign minister Kotzias said in an interview.

'The delimitation of the Greek EEZ in its entirety will be determined based on international law, and certainly without taking into account the unfounded and arbitrary theories espoused by Turkey, which is a violator of international law,' the foreign ministry said in a statement.

FYROM’s largest ethnic Albanian party, the Democratic Union for Integration, has made clear that it has no intention of imperiling the constitutional revision process.

Just as it provokes the public’s sense of justice when a former minister is charged with bribe-taking, it is equally provocative when a sitting minister demands the imprisonment of his political opponents, so that his party may win the elections.

A businessman and friend of former Pasok defence minister Yannos Papantoniou, has told investigating magistrates that in 2002-2003 he received 2.5mn euros in cash incrementally from the ex-minister, from whose Kifisia home he would pick up the money.

“Do you know, Mr. Papangelopoulos who the politician is [who bullied] the prosecutor, whose interests he serves and who holds him to account?” Democratic Left MP Theodorso Papatheodorou asked the minister.

In a bid to stem the tide, government ministers have declared that they will appeal decisions that are favourable for the plaintiffs, and that they are just losing their time.

Papantoniou was a top minister in the two governments of then Pasok leader Kostas Simitis. He is the second defence minister appointed by Simitis that has been jailed (in Papantoniou’s case, pending trial) over defence contract kickbacks, the first being Akis Tsochatzopoulos.

It is indeed true that “the extension of territorial waters are a legal and inalienable right of Greece according to international law”, but that does not mean that one can ignore either the international confluence of events, or the perpetually hostile posture and threats of Turkey.

The first four volumes of the secret Cyprus File, which has been locked up in the Greek Parliament for decades, and which was compiled, classified, and reconstituted by parliament, will be handed over by Parlaiment Speaker Nikos Voutsis to President Prokopis Pavlopoulos, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, and opposition leaders tomorrow. The full content of the […]