ATHENS, September 17 (RIA Novosti) – Greek Justice Minister Charalampos Athanasiou has asked IMF chief Christine Lagarde to provide more details on the death threats she claimed to have received.
Athanasiou requested additional information for launching an investigation by Greek officials, the Athens News Agency reported Tuesday.
In an interview with The Financial Times last week, Lagarde said that she was threated after making comments on tax evasion by wealthy Greeks.
“I better not say too much because, you know, when I have talked about Greece and its taxes before, I got death threats and we had to increase security,” the IMF chief said.
Last week, radical left Greek opposition coalition SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras said that he received similar threats in 2012.
A troika of international creditors – the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund – has kept Greece afloat since 2010, when it narrowly avoided bankruptcy, with loans worth 240 billion euros ($311 billion). As part of the rescue package, the troika requested the Greek government to modernize its banking system and crackdown on tax evasion.
