by Costas Efimeros
This scandal is, more or less, publicly known. In 2012 an agreement which was made between the three parties which shared the power, the infamous “quota”, meant that those parties would share the right to place their chosen ones in the public sector according to their own political criteria in a percentage which reflected their electoral score.
Given that all these are well known facts, we didn’t expect to be shocked when we started reading the hundreds of internal documents which we have secured. Yet reality surpassed us. Our first goal was to research thoroughly; we started by marking names, crosschecking evidence and making charts, but we soon realized that the far bigger scandal which hides behind all those documents is its very size. That is, the vast expanse of entanglement between party politics and the public service.
The leaders of New Democracy, PASOK and DIMAR, planned, organized and realized a complex mathematical model through which they tried to form the public sector according to their own benefit, and with absolutely no regard or interest in meritocracy.
Through the documents which we are investigating, and we will gradually bring to light, it becomes obvious that during the first days after the 2012 general elections, a whole mechanism was set up in order to make the “quota” happen.
The plan was of such complexity that those who undertook the task of realizing it had to make charts and sketches in which the whole public sector is being divided between the three governing parties as if it were a pizza cut in pieces. By public sector we mean the entirety of the public infrastructure.
This spans from the positions of the CO’s in companies of public interest, to the placement of people in low positions in hospitals, farming administrations even coastal police offices! The “quota” was to be imposed everywhere! In the beginning the representatives of each concerned party had to agree on the number of placements that each was entitled to. The next step was to start haggling about which person would cover which specific position. In the documents that we hold (many of which are marked as ‘confidential’) , the party (ND, PASOK and DIMAR) informs the special administrator of the concerned ministry about the specific names that they want in specific positions, not forgetting to mention which member of the parliament suggests and supports each candidate.
In those documents we also find a number of candidates’ CV’s which follow the MP’s suggestion. The essence of the whole procedure becomes obvious when one sees that the CV’s of the candidates for positions in the public sector mention nothing else but their actions within the political party which backs them. It is obvious that party loyalty was the only important criterion. Another scandalous fact which becomes obvious from those documents is that the government was willing, and it actually did, to alter by law the structure of entire public organizations so that new positions would be created in order to accommodate the people which their parties wished to place in the public sector.
Obviously the phrase “there are no dead ends in democracy” had a completely perverted meaning for the previous government.
In the following days, TPP will continue the investigation about the public administration and we will present a complete report concerning actual public positions. Until then, we would expect that justice would also start its own investigations, since the documents that we bring to light expose how a gang within the public sector had the ability to appoint the heads of all the public institutions according to their political affiliations and the support that they had from MP’s.
It is not unthinkable that those MP’s could have acted against the public interest or even could have been bribed. Even if our articles fail to automatically motivate justice, then we, personally, will go and submit all our evidence. Even if we accept that justice is blind, it is certainly not deaf and these documents shout a cry which must be heard..