Why the fate of Greece’s chief statistician matters

15/8/2016

Facts should not be a matter of negotiation and convenience

No one loves the messenger who brings bad news. The sentiment expressed by Sophocles is as much in evidence as ever in Athens, where Andreas Georgiou, the former chief of Greece’s statistical agency, faces criminal charges of “undermining the national interest” — because he applied EU rules to produce an accurate calculation of the country’s budget deficit. The figures were validated by EU statisticians, but his critics accuse him of colluding with Eurostat to inflate the debt, and say Greece was forced to accept bigger loans and harsher austerity as a result.

There are many people at fault in this latest twist in the Greek debt crisis but Mr Georgiou is not among them.

First and foremost is the government led by Costas Karamanlis from 2004 to 2009 — responsible for the worst excesses of over-borrowing in the run-up to the global financial crisis, and for its persistent under-reporting. The campaign against Mr Georgiou looks like a vindictive attempt to shift the blame for Greece’s financial collapse from a discredited political class that still hopes to make a comeback.

The socialist government that succeeded Mr Karamanlis showed a similar suspicion of Mr Georgiou’s work. They appointed him to head Elstat, an independent statistical agency set up as a condition of Greece’s first bailout, but also installed two political appointees on its board to keep him in check — one of whom will soon go on trial charged with hacking Mr Georgiou’s computer.

Alexis Tsipras, the prime minister, pledged to reform Greece’s corrupt political system when he brought his radical Syriza party to power but he too appears content to see the case against Mr Georgiou go ahead. The statistician, who spent more than two decades at the International Monetary Fund, is too convenient a scapegoat for a party ideologically opposed to all the IMF represents. Above all, Mr Georgiou’s prosecution reflects a political culture in which facts and figures are a matter of negotiation and convenience, and not of objective reality. If statistics can be massaged and manufactured, then an unwelcome number must be an act of hostility — and it becomes easy to believe that a former IMF official implementing European rules is serving the interests of Greece’s creditors.

Its European partners should bear some of the blame for fostering such a culture. After all, the EU’s larger member states have routinely escaped sanction for fudging the bloc’s budgetary rules; and in happier times, Brussels turned a blind eye to statistical sleight of hand because making a success of Greece’s membership of the euro was politically desirable. Moreover, politicians in all countries have become increasingly inclined to treat statistics as an aid to rhetoric, rather than a basis on which to form policy.

This is deeply damaging. Greece has little chance of overcoming the huge challenges it faces if it cannot recognise and quantify them. Politicians may not want to acknowledge the enormity of Greece’s debt burden. But they should surely want to identify, and rectify, the rising levels of hardship that Mr Georgiou exposed in the course of his work. Otherwise, Greece risks slipping into the kind of statistical vacuum suffered until recently in Argentina, where for years, official inflation figures meant nothing and the government claimed, against all evidence, that there were fewer poor people than in Germany.

Statisticians — a shy and technocratic breed — are an easy target. Mr Georgiou has the support of his international peers, who are raising money to help pay for his legal defence. He deserves more forceful support from EU leaders, as well as from Greece’s political class.

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