His commitment to “progressive government with a trunk SYRIZA will abolish the Regulator, which was voted for yesterday in Parliament, and, above all, will abolish any intention, any thought to privatize the public good called water,” he stressed. Alexis Tsipras at a meeting he had with the Community Water Initiative, which includes the EYDAP and EYATH trade unions, as well as a network of environmental organizations, at his office in Parliament.

Mr Tsipras emphasized that “today, on World Water Day, and after yesterday’s bill, it is time to face these privatization intentions and water, which is, so to speak, a public good.”enough, until now the privatization of water will not be accepted“”.

The President of SYRIZA-PS sharply criticized the Prime Minister, saying that “the strategy of Mr. Mitsotakis in everything it is a strategy of concealment and hypocrisy against truth and justice, which today is the demand of Greek society.” He noted that “yesterday, instead of giving an honest explanation to the Greek people, he once again tried to hide his responsibilities and a few hours before the vote on the bill to start the water privatization process, in which he concealed his intentions and again hypocritically told us, that this is not privatization.

Mr. Tsipras added that earlier in his statements on camera, Mr. Mitsotakis “spoke clearly, he said that his intention, his goal is the privatization of water and the first step towards realizing this goal is the creation of a Regulatory Authority, which happened yesterday.” “However, with hypocrisy,” he commented, “we were told all day yesterday that the establishment of the Regulatory Authority is an obligation of the Recovery Fund, but an obligation that he himself has built into the premises of the Recovery Fund.”

The leader of the official opposition said that “everything is clear”, stressing that “we see today, tragically, that this logic of making a profit by privatizing all services is dangerous for society, for security.” In this context, he raised the question “why was OSE discredited?” to continue by stating that “in 2019, at the height of the memos, we left it with 1,200 full-time employees, and today there are 700.” “It was cut down by workers for a very simple reason,” he said, “because the government’s goal was to privatize services on the network. A private person, when he comes to buy a service, wants to have less costs, therefore, fewer workers, less earnings. But the citizen pays more for the service and has less security.” “It is the same with water,” he noted, “if water is privatized, the citizen will pay much more, but hygiene and safety standards will be much lower.”

With his hand, employee representative on the EYDAP board of directors, George Alexandrakis, stressed that since today is World Water Day, the message that water is a public good is “more relevant than ever.” “A product,” he continued, “that the Greek citizens can use and that does not require a lot of money, and we have to protect it from commercialization, which, unfortunately, has been undertaken by all means during the last four years by the current government.” He said that “the first thing that the Mitsotakis government started to do when it came to power was to start privatizing the external water supply system in order to start selling 40% of the water supply to private individuals.”

Mr. Alexandrakis said that “we have not given up, we have taken the initiative with 70 environmental organizations, EYDAP, EYATH, DEVACH unions so that we can change this situation and we have achieved many victories on the water front. “. In particular, he said that “we managed to win decisions in the Council of Europe on the sale of the External Water Pipeline, the judges rose to the occasion and canceled this tender process. We were able to win decisions to keep EYDAP and EYATH shares under public scrutiny. The government came back in the summer with an amendment to be able to circumvent this decision of the Council of Europe, we continued, we went to the compliance committee of the Council of Europe, and on Monday a decision came out that obliges the current government to return the assets. under public control for 6 months.

Mr Alexandrakis added that at the same time they are fighting to maintain EYDAP reserves. He stated that “in 2019 the current government received EYDAP from your government with 420 million in reserves” and that “dividends were issued for 4 years, EYDAP was used at a loss, a contract was signed with the Greek state, which was predatory for the interests of the company and a few months ago tried to get a massive refund, 150 million.” “Basically, they would have exhausted his reserves,” he commented, adding that with the help of SYRIZA’s head of infrastructure and transport, Nikos Pappas, “we managed to prevent this ugly development of events.”

Source: RES-IPE