Pharmaceutical companies

Konstantinos Frouzis, former vice president and general manager of Novartis, claimed on Thursday that he was targeted so that politicians would be implicated in the alleged bribery scandal involving the Swiss pharmaceutical company.

A key witness in the inquiry regarding an alleged bribery scandal involving Novartis yesterday claimed to have met with top officials of leftist SYRIZA before the party came to power in 2015 during his second deposition before the parliamentary committee probing possible political interference in the investigation.

A key witness in the inquiry regarding an alleged bribery scandal involving Novartis claimed to have met with top ministers of main opposition SYRIZA in his second testimony before the parliamentary committee probing possible political interference in the investigation.

Efforts are under way to convene the plenary of the Athens Court of Appeals so that an investigation into the politically charged Novartis case can be referred to an investigating judge at the highest level, Kathimerini understands.

A parliamentary committee probing possible political interference in the Novartis investigation started examining a key witness on Tuesday after two SYRIZA MPs who have been barred from the committee, and disrupted it last week, stayed away. 

Conservative New Democracy MP Marios Salmas, one of 10 Greek state officials implicated in the original Novartis investigation, over the weekend denied claims that he sought to intervene in a subsequent judicial probe into the affair.

What happens when political parties have diverging views on the rules that govern the operation of the country's Parliament? And how should these differences be resolved, if not by the majority principle?

The Novartis affair which Mr. Tsipras had described as a major scandal and most opposition parties described as a conspiracy did not develop in a vacuum.

One must make some fundamental observations before describing the case.

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Political confrontation, especially when it is taking place in Parliament, is not hand-to-hand combat.

The "I'm not going anywhere" we heard on Wednesday in reaction to the ejection of two lawmakers from the special parliamentary committee investigating the handling of the Novartis case cannot be allowed to express a party that claims to be democratic.

A special parliamentary committee inquiring into the merit of claims of political interference in the Novartis bribery case removed on Tuesday two lawmakers of the main opposition, due to their status as potential witnesses in the case.
Dimitris Tzanakopoulos and Pavlos Polakis from SYRIZA will have to be replaced by two other party MPs.