The Greek press reported on the weekend that former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s mother is holding €550 million in a Swiss bank account.
The allegations could be an absolute nightmare and will breath new life into Greek anti-austerity protests. George Papandreou himself is a somewhat sympathetic figure. Shortly after his election in 2009, he exposed the deep accounting fraud that allowed Greece to build an enormous deficit.
The thing is, his father and grandfather were both Prime Ministers of Greece before him. None of them ever owned any kind of business that would generate that kind of wealth.
The harsh austerity in Greece is necessary but if the leading Greek political family of the past 60 years siphoned a half-billion euros out of the country, then there are some deeper issues that only blood in the streets can remedy.
The thing that continues to nag at me is that Troika officials and neighboring politicians aren’t clamoring for a crackdown on corruption and tax evasion. Makes you wonder who else has a Swiss bank account…
