‘Stay away’

After eight years of being dragged through the courts, spending who knows how much money and having his reputation dragged through the mud, the former artistic director of what today is called Hellenic Festival SA – the company that organizes the Athens & Epidaurus Festival – was acquitted of all charges of financial mismanagement by an Athens court of appeals this week. Giorgos Loukos had been accused in 2015 of squandering state money and was ousted from his post by then culture minister Aristeidis Baltas.

The charges were based on the discovery of certain invoices that were paid twice, leading to a discrepancy of 2.7 million euros. Asked by Kathimerini about the cause of the discrepancy, Loukos’ lawyer, Ilias Anagnostopoulos, said that due to staff shortages and a poor management structure (which is determined by the ministry), the artistic director also had to act as the organization’s president and did not have a proper finance chief or accounting department to keep track of expenses.

Loukos is not the only Greek who left a well-paid job abroad to help his country. Another Greek of the diaspora has been going through hell for the past 13 years

In other words, Loukos went through hell for eight years because the state is cheap when it comes to setting up and running an organization, but expects a lot from the people who must run them. The message it is sending to anyone who is ready to give something to this country is, in effect, “Stay away” – unless Parliament passes a law protecting festival artistic directors from prosecution the same way it did for the experts who dealt with the Covid pandemic and those investigating the deadly Tempe rail crash. 

Loukos is not the only Greek who left a well-paid job abroad to help his country. Another Greek of the diaspora has been going through hell for the past 13 years. Andreas Georgiou came to Greece to help keep track of its fiscal data. He did it meticulously and well (rebuilding the Hellenic Statistical Service so that every international organization and Greek government since 2010 has relied on its data), and for what? He is still being bullied by a political-judicial clique that is trying to whitewash the elephant that was the deficit of 15.6% of GDP in 2009. In Georgiou’s case, too, the message to anyone prepared to come to Greece to do their part is clear: “Stay away.”