The entire letter of N. Nikolopoulos
"Honestly, Mr. Prime Minister!
I believed that, in the face of this unspeakable national tragedy, you would do everything to shed light on the causes that caused it and to assign responsibility to those whose actions or omissions led to this tragic accident. But your actions as a government unfortunately show that this is not going to happen.
Specifically:
1) The members of the Commission appointed by your government to investigate the causes that caused the tragic accident do not guarantee that the responsibilities will be attributed to those actually responsible.
Initially, until the rise of Syriza to power, the CEO of TRAINOSE, Mr. Ath. Zeliaskopoulos, was chosen as a member of the Committee, so you were forced to replace him with Professor Pyrgidis Christos, who, like the other member of the Committee, Professor Profyllides Vasileios, appear in the list of Professors published by the late Aristea Bougatsou in KATHIMERINI on 13/11/2005.
The title of the publication was: "Great sponsor of the 'research' and... OSE benefactor".
These professors, as the publication states, received large sums of money through direct assignments, allegedly for "research work", and they were laying the carpet for the large contractors in critical projects of the OSE.
Take a look, Mr. Prime Minister, at their personal web pages, where they advertise the studies they have undertaken to date, and you will understand the role of these two professors in the projects of the OSE and ERGOSE, as well as other public bodies.
The execution of the projects was then undertaken by the large contractors with rigged tenders and with the cooperation of ministers, heads of the OSE and ERGOSE, but also their elected officials, the great train robbery took place, without the huge sums spent on the modernization of the railway to succeed in completing a 520 km long line, the main axis, i.e. Athens-Thessaloniki, where the tragic accident took place and on which the trains are running in the year 2023 "blindly", without the Signaling, Remote Control and the other security systems, which do not
they would allow what happened to happen.
2) Yesterday you appointed to OSE and ERGOSE the replacements of their dismissed Directors and those selected by your government are Panagiotis Terezakis for OSE and Christos Palios for ERGOSE. But both of them have a past, which in no way guarantees that they will carry out their duties, at these critical moments for their companies, with the required impartiality and transparency.
- Do you not know, Mr. Prime Minister, that Mr. Terezakis was from 2007 to 2010 General Manager of Infrastructure of the OSE, the period when the gradual collapse of the Signaling and Remote Control systems of the Athens-Thessaloniki axis began, which reached such a state in 2014 breaking point, when there was an immense need for their downsizing and the then government of Antonis Samaras, in the midst of memoranda, funded the now sinful contract 717/29-11-2014 for the downsizing of the systems in question?
Do you not know, Mr. Prime Minister, that Mr. Terezakis, as can be seen from his LinkedIn page, has been working (Full-time in fact) since 2016 until today at the company LDK Consultants, which conducts studies on ERGOSE projects, which have become bogged down ( such as GSM-R) and which are carried out by large construction companies, including the company TERNA of the father-in-law of the "archist" Minister of Transport Mr. Gerapetritis, whose contract 751/2015 with ERGOSE is controlled by the Prosecutor of Corruption Crimes?
Do you not know, Mr. Prime Minister, that Mr. Terezakis was a "Technical Advisor" to the ousted CEO?
Do you not know, Mr. Prime Minister, that Mr. Terezakis and his subordinates at the OSE, as the president of the Train Drivers' union said on a television show, are these days indulging in "cutting edge" of the talks between the Traffic Controller in Karolos and the Larissa Station ;
Shouldn't the prosecutor have intervened, confiscating recorders and computers, so that some evidence of the crime is not altered or disappeared?
– Do you not know, Mr. Prime Minister, that Mr. Christos Palios was until yesterday a member of the Board of Directors of ERGOSE, which on the one hand granted extensions of the sinful contract 717/29-11-2014 and on the other hand approved
the signing of the contractually unnecessary Supplementary Agreement, value
€13,2 million, which the "national contractor" had been trying to sign for so many years and therefore delayed the completion of the project, which if it had been completed, as you say, wouldn't we have reached the national tragedy of Tempe?
Do you not know, Mr. Prime Minister, that with the no. prot. D14/a/6351/F-WORK/12-01-2021 Decision of the resigned Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, Mr. Karamanlis, after a relevant recommendation by ERGOSE, whose board member was Mr. Christos Palios, another 2.767.782,93 were given to the joint venture of the "national contractor" with ALSTOM. €01, as compensation due to positive damages for the periods 05-2019-30 to 06-2019-01, 07-2019-31 to 08-2019-01, 09-2019-31 to 10-2019-01, 11 -2019-31 to 12-2019-01 and 01-2020-31 to 03-2020-XNUMX;
That is, during the days of your government, while the project had stopped being carried out through the clear fault of the consortium, due to its refusal to comply with its contractual obligations, it was recognized with the above decision of your minister and positive damages for the delays (! !!).
Unfortunately, Mr. Prime Minister, this decision is one for which your government is accountable and should be ashamed….
After the above, Mr. Prime Minister, is it ever possible to believe you, as you also assured the President of the Republic, that ample light will be shed on the causes that caused the national tragedy in Tempe and that the responsibilities will be attributed to those whose actions or omissions did they cause us to reach this tragic accident?
Your actions and your decisions point to a cover-up and the responsibilities will be attributed again, as in the accident in Adendros in 2017 during the era of another co-responsible government, to "human error" or at most to "human errors" of service agents, who work in such conditions, which are not permitted by the Greek and European Regulations for Trans-European Networks, such as the Athens-Thessaloniki axis.
Mr. Prime Minister, in the recent past I have sent you 13 letters but you never replied...
Today I am sending you this - perhaps the last as Prime Minister - on the occasion of the unspeakable tragedy caused by the collision of the two trains in Tempi, with dozens of dead and injured, which unfortunately confirmed, in the worst possible way, my long-standing complaints about the waste of public money, with scattered contracts that are never completed and direct assignments, with the sole purpose of serving the interests of specific large contractors that led to a "PLANNED CRIME" resulting in the murder of so many young people.
Mr. Prime Minister, during the years that you were in charge, you unfortunately continued the practice that has been followed in Greece for decades and that turned the railway network into a vast and perpetual construction site, with trains running without any modern safety specifications, literally "blindly".
At least since the day of the resignation of the General Secretary, Mr. Stathopoulos, you have known about the TRAIN ROBBERY... just as you cannot deny that from the first day you know that, following my own appeal, the Financial Prosecutor's Office has put under its microscope four contracts that were delayed or they were not implemented as they should have been for the modernization of the railway network... as well as the criminal justice system which then took it to the ARCHIVE and now BURIALED it???
Never, then or now, did the judges and why didn't they do a proper judicial investigation?
In all of the above, unfortunately, I have long ago mentioned in the capacity of a member of parliament, submitting a number of questions through parliamentary control, with which I criticized the waste of public money through the projects of the OSE, as well as the absence of projects for the modernization of operation of the railway lines, data that led to the national tragedy of Tempe and the death of 57 people.
I addressed you today as a former colleague in the parliament but also as the president of the Christian Democratic Party of Greece to underline that by covering former Ministers of Infrastructure - Transport and persons who exercised management in OSE ERGOSE GAIA OSE and "put their finger in the honey" the only thing it's appropriate to tell you it's "AND GOOD APOLOGIES"
Nikos I. Nikolopoulos / Founding member of / NEW REPUBLIC
