RSSeNEWS to be determined...

The deputy head of statistics at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), service, Andreas Georgiou, has been appointed to head up the Greek national statistics service.

Georgiou is the first chief statistician to be appointed by the Greek parliament rather than its finance minister. With this new independence his challenge is to restore credibility to the agency whose figures have been criticised as unreliable and subject to political manipulation.

EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn said recently that the Greek government had "cheated with its statistics for years and years". Now Prime Minister George Papandreou has given parliament a personal guarantee that "we will never return to the state of financial decline, distorted data".

To ensure greater transparency, the statistics agency will now have to verify government data instead of just processing it.

Following its election last October, the Socialist goverment issued budget deficit figures that were revised steeply downwards from those issued by its conservative predecessors. Near meltdown in the financial markets ensued and the country was forced to seek a bailout from EU partners and the IMF.