Greece Establishes Audit Committee Of Public Debt

  • by XpatAthens
  • Saturday, 21 March 2015
Greece Establishes Audit Committee Of Public Debt

Zoe Konstantopoulou, Speaker of the Greek parliament, on Tuesday announced the establishment of an Audit Committee of Public Debt to be headed by SYRIZA MEP Sofia Sakorafa and Eric Toussaint, the well known Belgian expert on odious debt. They will begin work in early April, presenting their findings in an international conference on public debt in June.

The committee will examine what proportion of Greece's public debt can be considered 'odious' and therefore illegitimate, looking not just at debts incurred during the 'crisis years' but also prior to 2010 and the public contracts for the Olympic Games, arms, transport, Siemens and the Hellenic Telecommunications Organisation (OTE S.A.) in particular. The committee will, Konstantopoulou explained, work in the interests of both Greece and the wider European community to ensure justice. 

In international law, debt can be defined as odious when the money is misappropriated - i.e. when the government uses the borrowed funds in ways that don't benefit citizens. It has been argued that successive governments should not be held accountable for this odious debt. 

When Greece's bailout programme began, leading anti-debt campaigners, the UK based Jubilee Debt Campaign, warned that the programme was repeating mistakes made in the developing world in recent decades, and that the loans were geared towards bailing out the banks rather than helping the Greek people, then leaving the burden of debt to be borne by the state and the Greek people thereafter.
 
 
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