Opposition parties had proposed the vote following a report in the Tobima newspaper that audio files leaked to the media in the hours after the two trains collided head-on had been doctored to appear to be an accident. . Human error, not Greece's aging rail network, is to blame.
Ahead of the parliamentary vote, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis dismissed the report as “misleading” and insisted that the entire record had been “available to the judicial authorities from the beginning”.
“You're saying that my concern and thoughts were to tamper with these conversations. Are you not embarrassed to say that?” he asked. “It's legitimate for businessmen and publishers to want to influence politics. Allow them themselves to enter the arena, not their agents.”
Earlier in the day, two of Mitsotakis' closest aides, Minister of State Stavros Papastavrou and Deputy Prime Minister Giannis Vratakos, are suspected of spending the night at the home of Evangelos Marinakis, a media mogul and shipowner who also owns To Bima. I resigned. The rally was held the day after the newspaper published the damning article.
The Greek government has confirmed that the meeting took place, but Vratakos and Papastavrou have not yet commented. Deputy Minister Makis Boridis dismissed the event as just a social gathering.
The Greek news website IIDISEIS reported on the gathering, saying, “There was a lot of whiskey flowing, and it was only interrupted to smoke fancy cigars,” adding, “The 'stern message' was delivered by copious amounts of wine, cigars, It turned into whiskey,” he added.