Greece entered the eurozone in 2001 with false data regarding its budget deficit. What went unnoticed at the time is now a topic of intense debate. Eurostat is now being accused of a superficial check of Greek data, writes Deutsche Welle.
What was the reason that Greece became a member of the eurozone in 2001, despite the false data regarding its budget deficit? According to one report, Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Union, bears part of the responsibility. The office only superficially checked the budget statistics coming from Athens. Such oversights were acknowledged by the European Commission, under whose jurisdiction Eurostat falls, as early as December 2004 in a letter addressed to both the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers of the EU.
The European Commission today publicly claims the opposite. ‘We did not have sufficient authority to verify the deficit data that turned out to be falsified in 2004.’ The reason that no one noticed the erroneous Greek data lies in the fact that Eurostat ‘failed to conduct a fundamental and systematic analysis of the coherence and consistency of the data,’ the European Commission admitted as early as December 2004. (Deutsche Welle)
