''Independent institutions remain anathema to the government in Greece.
Two cases that have dominated the headlines in recent weeks demonstrate
how the country's populist government, led by the hard-left Syriza
party, continues to put politics before reform and refuses to learn the
right lessons from the country's recent past.
The criminal case
against economist Andreas Georgiou returned to the spotlight last month
when it was reopened by the country's Supreme Court. A longtime official
with the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Georgiou had been appointed
six years ago to head the independent Hellenistic Statistical Authority,
or Elstat. The prime minister at the time, George Papandreou, created
Elstat as a response to the discovery that the government under his
predecessor, Costas Karamanlis, had underreported the country's fiscal
deficit.
After an exhaustive review, Mr. Georgiou revised the 2009
deficit figure upward to 15.4% of gross domestic product from 13.6%.
Elstat's European Union counterpart, Eurostat, fully accepted the
result, as it did all subsequent figures produced by Elstat during Mr.
Georgiou's five-year term. The age-old practice of putting asterisks of
doubt next to Greece's budget numbers ceased after 2010.''
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