Probe reveals fake civil servants qualifications

Alternate Interior Minister Leonidas Grigorakos on Wednesday called for the qualifications of all civil servants hired in the past 20 years to be rechecked for authenticity after declaring that 10 percent of staff hired from 2004 to 2009 were found to have submitted false education certificates.

Speaking to Kathimerini after revealing the preliminary findings of a process to check the authenticity of qualifications, Grigorakos called for the appointment of an independent authority headed by a judicial official tasked with checking the legitimacy of all civil servants’ education qualifications.

“We are here making horizontal cuts and this is not fair,” Grigorakos said. A total of 15,000 civil servants are set to lose their jobs by the end of 2014 and another 25,000 put in a mobility scheme by the end of this year as part of government efforts to streamline the public sector in line with troika demands.

According to the data presented by Grigorakos earlier in the day on Mega TV, 850,000 new hirings were made in the civil service in the 2004-09 period. “Of these, more than 10 percent were on the basis of false qualification certificates, which had not been approved by the Supreme Council for Personnel Selection (ASEP),” Grigorakos said, referring to the body responsible for appointing civil servants.