Photo Credit: Konstantinos Tsakalidis / SOOC
Video: Short documentary on bondholders with english subtitles, by Antonis Tziamtzis and Nikos Papageorgiou.

The damage from the PSI procedure to reduce Greece’s debt to around 15.000 individuals who had bought sovereign debt, was so significant that one in three cannot pay their bills, according to a survey conducted by SYFPOED, the association set up by bondholders to represent them.

“Up until today there have been 17 suicides of small bondholders. People that opted for the ‘certainty of the Greek state, to place their savings, the fruit of decades of hard work,” the association said at a press conference last week, adding that bondholders were from all walks of life.

The association said people’s savings disappeared after they were dragged against their will to participate in the restructuring of Greece’s debt in 2012. “The toll has been 15,000 destroyed families,” it said.

Almost 9 in 10 (88%) of the association’s members said they had not received any advise on the risks involved when they invested in Greek bonds.

“There were bondholders who are farmers, pensioners, sailors, builders,” the association said, bemoaning the fact that the Greek state has, since 2012, spent over  €6 billion to pay for bonds that matured ‘to funds abroad that speculate against the Greek economy.’

Bondholders also held a protest rally outside the Finance Ministry in Athens in late October, demanding compensation for their losses.

According to SYFPOED vice chairman Yiannis Tsolias, the restructuring of Greece’s debt occurred with a two year delay, against the interests of Greek citizens – natural persons and public funds alike.

SYFPOED’s president Yianns Marinopoulos rejected the government’s premise that it could not afford to make exceptions during the PSI procedure to protect small-time investors, as false, saying that billions in bonds held by the European Central Bank and the central banks of other EU member states were spared.

Marinopoulos cited a recommendation by Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, the legal firm representing the Greek state during the PSI, that natural persons should not be included in the procedure.

He also cited Greece’s General Accounting Office, which on February 24, 2012, proposed that natural persons should not be included in the PSI.

“This was done in contrast to what happened in bankrupt Argentina where small bondholders were protected, he said.

“No Greek will ever trust the Greek state for a hundred generations,” he said and called for the compensation of  bondholders.

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