Athens News Agency: News in English, 06-09-27

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From: The Athens News Agency at <http://www.ana.gr/>

CONTENTS

[01] Papandreou to visit Lesvos

[01] Papandreou to visit Lesvos

Papandreou will visit the campaign centres of local PASOK candidates in the prefecture and municipal elections.

Before his departure on Wednesday morning, Papandreou is to meet the Greek Hotels Chamber Committee and then the visiting Indian Parliament President.

Addressing a meeting of his party's policy coordinators on Tuesday, meanwhile, Papandreou had launched an assault on all fronts against the government, which he described as "tragic".

During discussions at the meeting, he slammed the government's performance in handling corruption, the phone-tapping scandal, the economy, health and education policy.

Regarding corruption, Papandreou stressed that PASOK rejected all concept of a "trade-off" and had urged the government to submit any evidence that it possessed regarding the allegations it had made while in the opposition to a public prosecutor. If anything were proved, PASOK would be the first to demand the punishment of those that had abused the trust of its governments, he added.

According to PASOK's leader, each of the scandals were not an isolated incident but a result of the lawless regime created by the present government, which he accused of not having made plans for anything except how to manage the state as plunder.

On the phone-tapping scandal, which once again made the headlines on Tuesday through a report in "To Vima", Papandreou said the government had not only signed an agreement allowing phone-tapping for the security of the Olympic Games but also renewed this agreement after the Games.

"This proves that they were not the victims [of the illegal mobile phone-tapping] as they claimed but the perpetrators," Papandreou said.

He once again slammed the government's decision for a "general audit" of the state's finances as "criminal", saying it had placed the economy under observation by the EU, while accusing the government of bumping up figures for GDP growth in order to extricate the country from the deficit procedure.

During the meeting, PASOK stated its opposition to Wednesday's joint meeting by Parliament's Committee on Institutions and Transparency and the Committee on Production and Trade, saying that only its MPs on the Production and Trade committee would attend.

PASOK had asked for a separate meeting of the Institutions and Transparency Committee and that the Competition Commission president and all its members be called to appear before it.

Finally, PASOK announced that it was launching a campaign to ascertain the true state of the country's health sector and asked that Health Minister Dimitris Avramopoulos be called to testify before Parliament's Committee on Social Affairs, while it will table a question asking the government to supply documents that present complete figures on hospitals, staff shortages, supplies, investments in biomedical technology and ICUs.

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