Speech by Thodoris Kritsa at the Plenary Session of the Parliament during the debate on the draft law of the Ministry of Finance «Incorporation of par. 5 of Article 1 of Council Directive (EU) 2017/952 of 29 May 2017 amending Directive (EU) 2016/1164 as regards inconsistencies in the treatment of hybrid instruments with third countries (L 114), ratification of the Agreement between the Hellenic Republic and the Hellenic Broadband Casino Enterprise Hellenic Joint Stock Company, for the concession of a licence for the operation of a wide range of casino business (ESCO) in the Metropolitan City of Elliniko - Agios Kosmas, adoption of an integrated framework for the provision of a sustainable development perspective and the re-operation of the Skaramanga Shipyards, amendments to the Code of Compulsory Expropriation of Real Estate and the Organisation of the State Legal Council, urgent tax and customs regulations
and other provisions of the Ministry of Finance».
THEODOROS DRITSA: Mr President, I will put a question first of all to the Bureau. Mr Staikouras spoke twenty minutes more than the eighteen minutes he was entitled to.
PRESIDENT (Apostolos Avdellas): It always does. He's a finance minister.
THEODOROS DRITSA: Mr Adonis Georgiades spoke six minutes more than the three minutes he was entitled to. Please respect the Members of Parliament and for equality of arms, because on the issues that are today I have served both as Minister of Maritime Affairs and as Minister of Defence, your indulgence, not as a favour to me, but for the fairness of the debate.
PRESIDENT (Apostolos Avdellas): Within reason, Mr Dritsas, right?;
THEODOROS DRITSA: Ladies and gentlemen of the House, before I get into the issue of the bill - and I have a dialogue, I think, quite cute with Mr.Staikouras, I am announcing it - I would like to touch on two issues.
One is that the convicted executioner of 15-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos, Police Officer Korkoneas, was released again, despite his conviction, because in the new procedure he was given extenuating circumstances. Alexandros Grigoropoulos was sentenced to death without mitigating circumstances. And because it is not a question of what the courts decide, and because history cannot repeat itself in the same tragic terms, I am telling you what is both common experience and personal experience, because I follow all these issues very closely. It was the hysteria against the youth at the time, against every young person who protested or rebelled, the hysteria methodically directed by the politics and the state of the right at the time that armed the hand of Korconeus. And because we have new phenomena of new phenomena of such anti-neoliberal hysteria, I sound the alarm and point out that the democratic struggles of the Greek youth and the Greek people have faced such authoritarian policies many, many times and have faced them successfully. Therefore, honour to the memory of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, but not to the mitigating circumstances of Korkones.
The second one was also raised by Euclid Tsakalotos. We have heard both in Parliament from Mr.Velopoulos and in public discourse in general, with the updating of the issue of women's right to decide whether or not to procreate - because that is what this is about - whether the termination of pregnancy for any reason will be criminalised, not only for reasons of the right to manage women's bodies and their lives, but also, above all, for the protection of children. It is not possible for societies, and indeed States, to accept the concept of unwanted pregnancy, or pregnancy much less pregnancy after rape, or pregnancy that a woman cannot respond to, or pregnancy that will mathematically lead the child, if born, to misery. These issues are huge and this immoral, scaremongering, neo-Puritanical hypocritical conservatism needs to end. Greek women and women in Europe and around the world have rights to determine their own lives.
I'm moving on to the bill.
Mr Staikoura, Minister, I have admired you in the past, frankly - because I do not underestimate my opponents - when you were a minister again in the previous government, for the documentation, for the evidence that you bring, that you put forward and I say «this man probably has a well-founded reason and we have to pay attention to it, whatever it is, to deal with it, but also to see if he is right about something» and so on. And by vice then, several years ago, I went down to the House services three, four, five times and got indicative of some of the documents that you were tabling in a very theatrical way in the House and that had impressed me. And I saw, Mr Staikoura, that in almost all of them the content of these documents that you submitted was either completely contrary to your claim, i.e. not only did it not confirm it, but it contradicted it, or it was other documents on other subjects. I regret for myself that I did not make an issue of it at the time. And you continue this famous tactic of alleged unreliability. There is no credibility in your word, there is contrived and contrived pseudo-seriousness. And this is a serious matter, because you are not addressing your opponents, you are addressing the Greek people and you cannot mislead them in this way.
Casino. We all know very well - and the KKE knows it - that for SYRIZA and Hellenikon and many other investments in the Port of Piraeus and Thessaloniki were options of coercion by the Troika, literally coercion. SYRIZA's productive development plans were different and very correct. Product of coercion! For you they were not. They were choices, very much part of your own programme. We did what we could.
So you appear today and blame SYRIZA for the current Greek situation. Excuse me, but the KKE is doing the same thing on its side, which is again wrong. Above all, SYRIZA's attempt was to correct the contract that had started as a tender before for Hellenikon, as it was in all other fields, it had to do primarily with the development of the large Metropolitan Park in Hellenikon, which takes years to develop as a forested area, etc., etc., etc.
And to point out that if the flagship of your miserable communication poison with which you won the elections was the Prespa Agreement and SYRIZA's betrayal of Greece and its history, the heavy artillery, the frigate was the Hellenikon, which SYRIZA allegedly did not proceed because it wanted the investments not to proceed. And you've done three and a half years and it still hasn't started and you're starting with the casino. And as our rapporteur, Tania Eleftheriadou, rightly pointed out in her speech, in what way? With permanent regulations with everything for the concessionaires. Well, no. These options have nothing to do with SYRIZA's policy, even when SYRIZA, in the circumstances, chooses to take steps backwards in order to take overall steps forward.
Scaramagas. Excuse me. The colleagues have said it. There was a competition. I understand very well the argument of the binding conditions that had arisen from the great adventure of state aid and fines that have weighed on the history of the Skaramagas Shipyards, a project of New Democracy and PASOK. Excuse me. If Charilaos Trikoupis's «unfortunately we are bankrupt» is also the fault of SYRIZA, please tell us. The bankruptcy of the Skaramanga Shipyards, the bankruptcy of the Elefsina Shipyards, the bankruptcy of the Syros Shipyards were the work of New Democracy.
PRESIDENT (Apostolos Avdellas): Finish, please.
THEODOROS DRITSA: I will conclude, Mr President.
From this point of view, how is it possible that you do not take responsibility? I do indeed understand that Mr Prokopiou, as Mr Georgiades said, is a very restrained businessman and knows what he wants. I am not judging Mr Prokopiou. It is obvious that it is precisely because he knows what he wants as a well-balanced businessman that he gave you and proposed all this legislation that you are bringing forward today, because he says: «I want these things in order to do my job».
If this was state planning, public planning, government planning it would have been included somehow in the competition. It isn't. It's a businessman's proposal because that's what he wants to do. So either the entrepreneur will take it on or it will be solved in some other way number one issue is securing the workers both for their accruals and for their next job and everything else that has been said is just a pretense, a sad pretense.
And secondly, if the investment will be an investment mainly for shipyards or if the investor, as is given the possibility by this regulation today, chooses that some other business activity, LNG or whatever, is more profitable for him, he will abandon or downgrade the shipbuilding industry and turn his attention to the other one. You don't ensure it, you give him every right to do so, and by law.
We want Greece to have a shipbuilding industry in the next day that is not competitive with Korea, China and Japan, but in any case equivalent to what its history, the know-how of its workers, dictates, the delivery to Greece of a shipbuilding industry that is indeed important and which is also directly linked to the shipbuilding and repair zone of Perama, the Skaramanga shipyards, or we will give every investor, whether serious or not, the opportunity to choose the type of investment he wishes to make, as the legislation does.
PRESIDENT (Apostolos Avdellas): Mr Dritsas, thank you. You have no more time.
THEODOROS DRITSA: So these are serious issues that you cannot evade. That is why the popular demand for elections and a change of political reality is constantly growing and I believe that it will be expressed in a public way by Greek society.
Thank you.
