One million euro for George Papandreou’s special advisers

21 August 2012 / 15:08:09 GRReporter

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The special advisers to former Prime Minister George Papandreou cost the state budget nearly one million euro. State Minister Dimitris Stamatis stated the exact amount of 997,839 euro in response to a question by SYRIZA’s deputies Stathis Panagoulis and Nasos Athanasiou. The document, however, does not name the costly advisers.

According to the data, a total of 20 special advisers were assigned in the office of Prime Minister George Papandreou in the period from October 2009, when PASOK took the power until November 2011, when he left the chair. Some of them were employed as such and others were transferred from the civil services, in which they had been permanently assigned.

In particular, the prime minister had three special advisers in October 2009 with total gross monthly salaries amounting to 3,524 euro. Their number had tripled a month later and thus their salaries reached 19,688 euro. In December the same year, George Papandreou’s advisers were already 14 and their monthly incomes were to the amount of 39,437 euro.

But the big "jump" in the number of advisers to the former prime minister happened in 2010, when Greece was included in the European mechanism of financial support. The number of advisers reached 20 at that time. In February 2010, they were 17 with a total monthly remuneration of 37,322 euro. A month later, another adviser was included in the team and the salaries jumped to 40,016 euro. In June 2010, a month after the signing of the first Memorandum of financial aid, the number of people in the team close to George Papandreou reached 20 with total gross monthly incomes amounting to 45,404 euro. In July, they reached 49,654 euro although the number of advisers was still 20.

In August 2010, their number dropped to 19 and wage costs decreased to 42,710 euro respectively; in October and November – they were 18 and the salaries amounted to 41,880 euro.

In the first three months of 2011, the number of special advisers to Prime Minister Papandreou dropped by one and the cost of their salaries decreased to 38,892 euro per month but in May, June and July, they numbered 18 again and their total income was to the amount of 41,433 euro. In August and September 2011, they numbered 17 to jump back to 19 in October - a month before George Papandreou left the premiership. The cost of their salaries reached 39,627 euro in the same month.

Special advisers’ incomes were the highest in December 2010, when the cost of salaries of 19 people reached 52,782 euro.

According to the table, the costs by years are as follows:

2009 (for three months after winning the election) – 62,649 euro

2010 – 505,533 euro

2011 – 429,657 euro

The question of the two deputies of SYRIZA was about specific special advisers to George Papandreou -the Spanish architect Jose Eusebio and the Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz.

The deputies had required information about the exact number of advisers to the former Prime Minister, their remuneration, data for the area in which they had been providing their advices, and their reports.

"Providing the data is necessary to clarify what services they provided to Greece and how they corresponded to the remuneration received," SYRIZA’s deputies stated in the question, but received no answer.

It is worth noting that at the beginning of the term of the PASOK government, friendly media and journalists claimed that all these world-known people prominent in their fields would have provided their services for free.

Spanish architect Jose Eusebio

As GRReporter wrote in May 2011, the Greek government had commissioned the Spanish architect the project for making a park on the old Athens airport Ellinika without a competition. In an attempt to avoid this obstacle, government representatives responded to the European Union, "Eusebio is a personal friend of the Greek Prime Minister and he will make the project without pay." After the approval of the privatization program worth 50 billion euro by the government commission, "interested competitors" from the European Union, including a Spanish and a Dutch company, found out that one of the advisers was the company Barcelona Strategic Urban Systems (BSUS) and one its owners was Jose Eusebio - one of the special advisers to Prime Minister George Papandreou.