Main opposition New Democracy’s Vice-President and former health minister Adonis Georgiadis held a news conference today to charge that Alternate Health Minister Pavlos Polakis, in cooperation with the current administration of Hellenic Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (KEELPNO) devised a sinister plot to incriminate him for his hiring practices as minister.

Polakis first charged several months ago that Georgiadis had illegally hired 23 employees at KEELPNO.

The former minister countered that he was not responsible for the hiring, and asserted it was perfectly legal, as it had been approved by KEELPNO’s Board of Directors.

Today, Georgiadis charged that documents registered in KEELPNO’s protocol and that proved his innocence were altered or removed.

The former minister claimed that a few days ago, a decision, dated 16 December, 2013, was produced from the protocol of the Secretariat of the Board of Directors of KEELPNO.

He said the decision lists the hiring of over seventy employees, and not just the 23 whom Georgiadis has been accused of illegally hiring. Had this been known, he claimed, it would have been obvious that the charges were groundless.

“Just yesterday we learned that the relevant decision that proved that the charges were baseless disappeared from KEELPNO’s protocol,” Georgiadis said.

Georgiadis: Company guarding archive in conspiracy

Georgiadis claimed that the company hired by Polakis to guard the documents at KEELPNO conspired to remove the document that he claims proved his innocence.

Moreover, he charged that Polakis “illegally disbursed eight million euros” to hire this company, on instructions from attorney Nikolaos Hamtzoudis, who was appointed legal advisor to the president of KEELPNO in 2016.

Georgiadis alleged that the said company altered the protocol of KEELPNO documents. He claimed that when the company moved, a USB flash drive was found, which contained evidence of illegal tampering with the archive.

Georgiadis said the flash drive contained the “hair-raising” evidence that proves the criminal agreement to tamper with the protocol.

He said that the USB files bear Hamtzoudis’ electronic signature and a note stating: “Attention: the security company must continue to completely bar access to the protocol and the storage spaces. All means must be marshaled so that employees do not become aware of what is going on. The documents with the protocol numbers that we referred to must be completely removed, once I review them again.”

Georgiadis said that the USB flash drive mistakenly fell into the hands of an employee “who fears for his job and his safety”, and who anonymously handed it over to the employees’ union, which in turn delivered it to Corruption Prosecutor Eleni Touloupaki and to the General Inspector of Public Administration, Maria Papaspyrou.

Georgiadis said that Papaspyrou stated on 12 December that she would send a team to inspect KEELPNO, but that this has not occurred yet.

in.gr

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