Independent member of parliament Efi Ahtsioglou harshly criticized the ND government during the debate in parliament on the bill on bad loans.

In her first speech from the Plenary floor after leaving SYRIZA, Ms. Ahtsioglou unilaterally attacked the ND, accusing it of persisting in its harmful strategic choice, which led to the largest redistribution of real estate from the country’s popular and middle classes to foreign funds.

“2023 marks a 15-year auction record. Over 65,000 are the scheduled auctions. This is the harsh reality to which the strategic choice you made to deal with private debt has led,” said Ms. Ahtsioglou.

“As far as private debt is concerned, in the last three years things have evolved in a much worse way than the scenario that the opposition had predicted at the time, when they were sounding the alarm about what was going to happen. So what happened? In the last two and a half years, borrowers have found themselves in an extensive wave of auctions, and of first homes, in funds that operate completely unregulated,” he argued.

At the same time, he refuted the ND’s argument that private debt has decreased, arguing that “in the last four years it has increased by at least 40 billion euros.”

As Mrs. Ahtsioglou said, this is due to the strategic choice made by the ND to deal with private debt, which has three characteristics:

-first: liquidation of assets and generalized bankruptcies as the main tool for dealing with private debt,

-second: no protection of the first home, in the sense that no citizen who owes remains the main owner of his home, and

-third: the transfers of loans from banks to funds are governed by the legislative framework of 2003 in which there is no obligation to propose a previous regulation, before the forced execution.

Mrs. Ahtsioglou was also critical of the extrajudicial mechanism, arguing that it does not offer substantial solutions.

“Once 10,000 arrangements have been made, this means in percentage terms of debts, that of the approximately 90 billion in bad loans, only 3.5 billion of overdue debts to the banks have been settled. This is not even 4% and the funds now control with real collateral about 700,000 properties in the country”, he said and continued: “The perimeter you draw with the income of 7,000 euros is for show, it is not for essential protection. And it is so narrow that the unemployed person on zero income is no longer vulnerable and will not be protected.”

“The protection given to the vulnerable is for the public. The vast majority of the popular and middle classes remain without protection and essentially from tomorrow they will face with the same intensity exactly the same problem they faced until today. That is, the threat of auctions of first homes. And with this bill you continue and insist on the same methodology, the same socially harmful strategy to serve the interests of banks, funds and servicers, by utilizing public money”, concluded Ms. Ahtsioglou.