Merkel needs to pay up.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/04...report-claims/The Greek government is in disarray after the leak of an explosive report drawing up reparations claims against Germany, covering both the First and Second World Wars.
Prime Minister Antonis Samaras held a special meeting with top officials Tuesday to limit the diplomatic damage from the 80-page report.
The document – stamped “Aporito”, or secret – was drafted by a panel of experts for the Greek finance ministry and delivered last month.
The alleged claims against Germany reach a grand total of 162-billion euros ($214-billion), including 108-billion euros ($238-billion) for rebuilding the country after the Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1944. This is 80% of Greek GDP.
The panel was chaired by Panagiotis Karakousis, head of the General Accounting Office at the Finance Ministry, and relied on 190,000 pages of documents scattered in archives.
Mr Karakousis said that the report was commissioned by the current leadership.
“The purpose was to gather all the material available so that the political leaders can check the data,” he said.
The Greek foreign ministry said the report would be sent to the State Legal Service to assess and set the “claims of the Greek State”.
The report was first leaked to a Greek newspaper at the weekend in a story entitled “What Germany Owes Us”.
The panel concluded that Athens had legitimate grounds to press claims. “Greece never received any compensation, either for the loans it was forced to provide to Germany or for the damages it suffered during the war,” it said.
The newspaper said the issue has “detonated like a bomb” at a critical juncture when Greece is under intense pressure from creditors. “The government should publish all the findings and determine its position on this sensitive issue,” it said.
There has long been a vociferous lobby calling for war reparations from Germany, with the so-called “National Council” calling for as much as euros 500bn to cover stolen art work and the loss of 50pc of economic output over almost four years. Some 300,000 Greeks died under the Axis occupation, mostly from starvation.
But the new report is very different because it is an official document of the finance ministry. It is unclear, however, what Athens hopes to gain by stirring up a highly emotional issue.
The report is certain to be viewed by German officials as a form of moral blackmail as tough talks continue over each stage of Greece’s EU-IMF-ECB Troika programme. Sources in Greece say the document was prepared as a bargaining chip to be put away in a draw and used only in extremis.
The gambit raises serious questions about the true intentions of Mr Samaras, who has positioned himself as a friend of Angela Merkel, the German chancellor.
It again exposes the breakdown of trust in the eurozone after three years of depression in the south and mutual recriminations between creditors and debtors. It suggests that Greeks are not in fact reconciled to the policies being forced upon them.
The report includes a welter of different claims on Germany, including euros 54bn for the costs of forced loans from the bank of Greece to cover the wages of German troops and the Afrika Korps.
Greece has already enjoyed debt relief, though at the expense of private pension funds, insurers, and banks, rather than the German state.
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Originally Posted by GB.
