No sooner has the noise about the “forgotten” €1 million in foreign accounts died down than Nikos Androulakis is again at the center of a case that blows into the air the narrative of political ethics he has been cultivating for years.
This time not for bank deposits that didn’t show up in Background, but for a property his family has been renting to the Greek Government for 16 years, totaling more than 1.2 million euros.
The story begins in 2010, when the State decides to lease a property of the Androulakis family in Heraklion at a rent of 10,000 euros a month. In other words, at the time when the country was seeing the plague of the memorandum coming towards it. At that time Nikos Androulakis was already a member of the Central Committee of PASOK. Of course, it is impossible that this played any role in the final selection of the property. PASOK had never given such rights. After all, what could be more normal than a property owned by the family of a party official being chosen at a high rent, even though there were cheaper offers on the market;
But it’s not just the rent. According to contract documents, interventions were also made to the property with government money; improvements, remodeling and work that increased the value of a private property with taxpayer money. All this while Mr. Androulakis appears as a persecutor of any relationship between politics and state money.
And the story doesn’t end there. The property later passed to Nikos Androulakis himself through parental provision and the contract continued as normal. In fact, on December 12, 2022, a new lease was signed with him now personally as the Government contractor. The timing is particularly interesting. Androulakis had already been elected president of PASOK since 2021 and was daily in the TV windows denouncing the government as “kamora” and “regime” because of the case of the EYP surveillance. So at the same time that he was dispensing lessons in institutional sensitivity and political ethics, he was also signing the continuation of a state lease that brings him tens of thousands of euros every year.
What is even more striking is the silence of those who usually pretend to be the impeccable prosecutors of public life. If it had been revealed that Kyriakos Mitsotakis had been collecting rent from the Public Sector for 16 years for family property, the country would be living weeks of political hysteria. There would have been talk of corruption, of a state-owned system, of moral incompatibility. There would be calls for resignations before the first newscast was over.
But now it’s all presented as more or less a normal business relationship with the state. Just as normal as the million that the accountant “forgot” to declare on his Opinance.
It seems that two goats on the same back in one week not only fit, but are carried with political bravado as if nothing is going on. On the one hand the “forgotten” million abroad and on the other the 17 years of rent from the Greek State. And all this from a politician who appears daily as a strict inspector of ethics in public life. The problem for Nikos Androulakis is not just the revelations. It’s that each new case shatters a little more of the image of the man who ostensibly came to clean up the political system than what he ultimately seems to find perfectly acceptable when it comes to himself.
