By CHRIS GRAEME chris.graeme@theresidentgroup.com
The Greek Deputy Prime Minister has issued a stark warning to Portugal that it will be the next on the European Union, German and ratings agencies economic hit list.
The warning issued by Theodoros Pangalos in an interview published in Portuguese business daily Jornal de Negócios on Monday comes at a time when diplomatic and commercial relations between Portugal and Greece and EU economic giant Germany have hit their lowest levels since the end of World War II.
Portugal has been the target of various alleged economic scams of qualified fraud and falsification of documents over a billion euro submarine contract with one of Germany’s engineering giants, MAN Ferrostaal (read story on page 10).
Despite the Portuguese Criminal Investigation Department’s (DCIAP) repeated attempts to solicit the cooperation of the German authorities in the case, the requests have met with an alleged wall of silence from the German Public Ministry.
Over the weekend, it also emerged that Portuguese magistrates working in Germany on the Ferrostaal Case were allegedly told to pay 35,000 euros in bribes if they wanted access to the company’s server data and computer files.
Last month it was reported in the German press that a high-ranking German minister suggested that the Greeks “sold off some of their islands” to German tourism developers to pay off its debts, which run at over 12 per cent of GDP. Then the Greeks accepted a faulty submarine, which had been dragging through the courts for four years, allegedly in return for German and French approval of its budget crisis rescue package in the EU.
Not only that, the cash-strapped Greeks, who have been facing the worst strikes and social unrest in recent years over government austerity measures, have now suddenly agreed to buy two more ThyssenKrupp submarines of the same type from Germany while the French have brokered a deal to sell them several frigates.
Theodoros Pangalos stated over the weekend: “I need to give you some advice. Don’t be neutral over this because you are the next victims,” he said adding that Germany needed to “change its attitude”.
“Some countries, such as Germany, have been taking a high-handed moral and racial attitude over our problems,” he said.
“They think that the Greeks have problems because the prevailing stereotype is that we don’t work enough because we have a good climate and don’t take things seriously like the Germans supposedly do,” he added.
But he said that Greece’s problems lay in its public sector – and not its private sector – which had too many people.
“The fact is that Germany is a country with problems like any other. We buy their products, you buy their products and they need the EU and its markets. They enjoy good and competitive performance – good for them, but remember that Greece has existed without the Euro and for 8,000 years,” he stressed.
He also said that going to the IMF wasn’t a crime for member states that had paid into the scheme. “Portugal and Greece are members; they have a right to use it when necessary,” he said.
The Portuguese press has already begun publishing barbed anti-European Union, anti-German commentary pieces suggesting that the “EU is a monster with many heads without a head” and allusions that the Germans are “racist and obsessed with ethnic homogeneity”.
High-ranking sources have, in the past few months, suggested that if Portugal tries to annul the submarines contract with the German firm it could result in German political and commercial pressure to withdraw Volkswagen Europa from Portugal and relocate it to Eastern Europe.
Do you have a view on this story? Please email Editor Inês Lopes at ines.lopes@theresidentgroup.com
