The member of parliament from Thessaloniki and former deputy minister of the Environment and Energy in the government of SYRIZA, Socrates Famellos, launched an attack on the government and personally on the Kyriakos Mitsotakis, regarding the administrative mess that left thousands of households without power for more than three 24-hour periods, the day after «Medea» storm».
Here is the relevant announcement.
Your responsibilities are not being met, Mr. Mitsotakis, after three days and nights without power.
Mr. Mitsotakis is trying to hide the complete failure of the government’s otherwise «highly efficient» administration, which he heads, by offering discounts on the electricity bills of people who, along with their families, were left without power for more than three (3) full days amid a severe cold snap.
He even expressed his frustration at the back-and-forth shifting of blame among the various officials during today’s meeting of the New Democracy parliamentary group, as if he were just some ordinary commentator or observer of the situation, rather than the country’s prime minister.
It is now trying to show that it cares about citizens by offering retroactive discounts on electricity bills. However, it has shown no concern for either citizens or business consumers for nearly two years now because:
-Allow instances of «price gouging» in the energy market, where the price of electricity for consumers is up to four times (!) the wholesale price, in the midst of a pandemic
-It allowed and supported «»schemes' worth hundreds of millions of euros in the balancing market, which result in very high electricity costs for Greek citizens and businesses, in the midst of a pandemic and an economic crisis
-Promote the privatization of HEDNO, with the country seeking to relinquish a natural monopoly that guarantees steady profits and secure investments
-It failed to staff HEDNO with technical and scientific personnel, it undermined its technical capabilities and the network inspection procedures, which would have significantly prevented and addressed outages more quickly
-He was not «bothered» by the letter from his employees GENOP-DEI, on February 12, which warned of the severity of the severe weather and called for that the necessary units and crews be placed on high alert in order to minimize problems and, consequently, inconvenience to consumers
–He turned HEDNO into a breeding ground for blue-collar «overpaid» kids with eleven new director positions, without a business plan and with almost no staff left, as HEDNO’s regular workforce is shrinking. With exorbitant salaries of 150,000 euros per year for General Directors and 91,000 for regular Directors. They’ve even hired Directors to assist the General Directors. Assistant Director: The dream of every DAP-NDFK executive.
However, this raises a question for us. What did the newly established Crisis Management Directorate of HEDNO do to address the Medea storm, and how many staff members does it have?;
Now, after the fact, and now that the government’s «strategic» mess and incompetence have been exposed, Mr. Mitsotakis is scrambling to cover up his responsibilities with electricity discounts—something we’ve been calling on him to do for a year now. «I’ll burn you, my dear Yiannis, and then rub oil on you.’.
History, however, will record that for three days and nights, tens of thousands of households in Greece were without power—a situation attributable to Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
