It’s been exactly one month since Yanis Varoufakis resigned [6] his post as Greek Finance Minister, but his legend has only grown.
The self-proclaimed "erratic Marxist" whose exploits in the Greek finance ministry include driving German FinMin Wolfgang Schaeuble to the edge of insanity and posing for a Paris Match photoshoot that was anything but austere, one-upped himself on July 16 when, in a recorded call with "international hedge funds," he detailed [7] a James Bond-ish plot to set up a parallel payment system in Greece by creating secret accounts using tax filer numbers for individuals and corporations which he would obtain by hacking into the troika-controlled General Secretary of Public Revenues. The full audio recording [8] of the call was eventually released.
Varoufakis would later tell The Telegraph that "they" are out to get him for his "cloak and dagger" drachma plan. "The context of all this is that they want to present me as a rogue finance minister, and have me indicted for treason [9]," he told [10] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.
Although it’s not entirely clear why having a Plan B constitutes a punishable offense (indeed, under the circumstances, it seems like the punishable offense would be not having a plan B), it looks like the chief prosecutor of the Athens First Instance Court is prepared to portray Varoufakis as a cyber crime mastermind and will now launch a full scale investigation into the General Secretariat for Public Revenues plot. Here’s Kathimerini with more [11]:
Ilias Zagoraios, the chief prosecutor of the Athens First Instance Court, has asked Greece’s cyber crime unit to investigate whether the public revenues service was hacked as part of an effort to create a parallel payment system under ex-Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis.
The former minister has claimed that he talked to a ministry employee about hacking into the General Secretariat for Public Revenues’ online system during alleged attempts to create a scheme that would help the government overcome liquidity problems.
Varoufakis did not clarify whether this breach took place. However, his claims prompted an internal investigation by the general secretary for public revenues, Katerina Savvaidou.
Now, a second probe will be carried out by the cyber crime unit, which should be able to provide its findings to Zagoraios before Savvaidou completes her investigation.
So we will now apparently learn whether Varoufakis and his elite "cyber crime" team actually succeeded in hacking into the public revenues service.
If they did, we imagine opposition lawmakers will push for the ex-FinMin to be drawn and quartered (politically speaking, of course) for attempting to ensure that in the event Berlin decided to shut the Greek banking system down entirely, the country wouldn't descend into outright chaos.
That, apparently, may be a crime.
