ATHENS — The government is once again "attempting to use the pandemic to concentrate the market in the hands of a powerful few," by creating conditions of unfair competition in the retail sector at the expense of smaller businesses, main opposition SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance sector head for development and investments, Alexis Charitsis, said on Monday.

Speaking on radio station "Kokkino 91.4 Thessaloniki" he called for real support for small businesses, which were losing a quarter to a third of their usual annual turnover, due to the lockdown over Christmas.

"Even though the government has significant capability to support health and the economy, it is continuing the very same policy that created a 10-billion-euro hole in public revenues and led the economic climate and recovery prospect to a nadir," he added, while criticising the reduction in social spending in the 2021 budget, along with higher taxes and stagnant public investment.

At a time when everyone in Europe admitted that austerity policies lead nowhere, he said, the government was pushing an "outdated" agenda of privatisations and "an overall change in paradigm that benefits the very few", adopting the same way of thinking in its budget and the Pissarides report as that which plunged Greece into a crisis some years ago, he added.