The judicial ordeal of ELSTAT’s Andreas Georgiou continues

Contrary to what many believe, the ordeal of Andreas Georgiou, the former president of the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT), in the Greek courts has not ended. After being tried three times for allegedly inflating the 2009 deficit, which New Democracy circles believed pushed the country deeper into austerity, the Appeals Council acquitted him for the third (!) time in 2019.

However, in a separate but related case, in 2017 he was given a two-year suspended prison sentence for breach of duty because he did not seek the approval of the ELSTAT board before communicating the revised fiscal figures for the period 2006-9 to Eurostat in November 2010.

His conviction contravenes the Code of Practice for European Statistics (COP, Principle 1.4), which explicitly states that the head of the statistical service has "sole responsibility" for the compilation and publication...