In an unprecedented move, Wednesday, the European Commission blatantly intervened in an ongoing judicial investigation in Greece regarding the role of former head of the Greek statistical services (ELSTAT), Andreas Georgiou, who is officially accused of falsifying financial data that lead to the swelling of the Greek debt in 2010. The Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs, Skills and Labour Mobility, as well as European statistics, Marianne Thyssen, said: “The independence of the Hellenic Statistical Authority ELSTAT and the quality of its statistics are essential. For the Commission and Eurostat it is absolutely clear that data on Greek Government debt during 2010-2015 have been fully reliable and accurately reported to Eurostat”. The Commission also cites a letter by EC Vice-President Dombrovskis, Commissioner Pierre Moscovici and Thyssen to Greek FinMin Euclid Tsakalotos over the matter. The Greek government responded to the intervention via its spokesperson, Olga Gerovasili, who issued a statement stressing that Finance Minister had sent a letter to the Commission expressing his surprise over the intervention on a domestic court matter. The Greek government points out the contradiction in the Commission’s letter to Tsakalotos, where even though it claims to uphold its principles of non intervention in political matters it goes on to urge the Greek government to take a stance on the Georgiou matter and the integrity of the statistical data. Gerovasili stresses that if the EC had inside information and the scientific capacity to pass judgement on the Georgiou case, it had the moral obligation to testify before the Greek courts to facilitate the investigation. Government sources stressed the EC’s intervention in the case merely confirms the close ties between Gerogiou and circles in Brussels, while others in the government went even further claiming Brussels were backing ‘their man’. Apart from the essence of whether Georgiou had indeed tampered with data that resulted in Greece being forced to enter into the first fiscal adjustment program (memorandum), a matter which will be decided in the Greek courts, the issue has given the Greek government the opportunity to score some domestic political points by pushing the narrative that it had been caught in a conspiracy and that the Papandreou government was responsible for intentionally dragging Greece into the memorandum and the imposition of harsh austerity measures. Major opposition party New Democracy has also found itself in a somewhat awkward position, as its previous leader, Antonis Samaras had initially also questioned the statistical data provided by Gerorgiou and pledged to hold an official probe into the matter, before finally agreeing to accept the reliability of the data after winning the elections and forming a coalition government, among other with PASOK. New Democracy has yet to comment on the EC’s intervention. Meanwhile, PASOK latched onto the EC’s letter addressed to the Greek Finance Minister commenting that the financial data between 2010-2015 cannot be doubted and called on SYRIZA and New Democracy to stop peddling myths.