The government appears to be attempting to establish a "special form of legal immunity from prosecution" for political figures, making them only liable for administrative rather than criminal offences, main opposition PASOK-Movement for Change spokesperson Kostas Tsoukalas asserted on Tuesday, in statements to Mega television.
Pointing out that Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had pledged that there will be no obstacles to the truth about the Tempi train collision coming out, Tsoukalas said that if the government then proceeds based on its own proposal to examine only misdemeanours in order to clear former minister Kostas Karamanlis from the start, "this means that the prime minister is deeply inconsistent."
Such a course would also contradict "the possible proposal that the government wishes to submit regarding misdemeanours - which is a criminal procedure in the Parliamentary preliminary investigation - while claiming that there cannot be criminal responsibilities for ministers anywhere," he added.
Regarding PASOK's own proposal for a parliamentary preliminary investigation, the press spokesperson said that this amounted to an investigation into whether former minister Kostas Karamanlis had been aware of a series of facts and had still failed to do what was necessary but instead "accepted the possibility that railroad safety might be disrupted".
Tsoukalas clarified that this did not require Karamanlis to accept the possibility that deaths might occur, since this would have led to examining a charge of homicide. If proved, he said, it would be a crime of omission based on the minister's legal obligation to act to avert any disruption in transportation.
He also pointed out that the proposal did not amount to an indictment or prosecution but a discussion of these actions at the level of a preliminary investigation. The government, he added, seemed loathe to even have a discussion and instead wanted Karamanlis to only be investigated for misdemeanours from the outset.
Tsoukalas also commented that the government blamed the state of the railroads on the regulatory authority for the railroads, RAS, even though RAS had asked for its intervention, citing deep concern about the possibility of an accident, in a document sent on December 13, 2021. A second RAS document sent to the Hellenic Railways Organisaton (OSE), which is supervised by the transport ministry, four months prior to the accident in 2023, had also pointed to potential problems, including in traffic control systems.
He said that additional political figures had been included in PASOK's proposal based on their responsibilities during the period between 2016 and 2023, when the Tempi rail collision occurred, given that there had been a constant flow of documents from the relevant bodies to say that things were not as they should be.
