ATHENS — "The fact that the government released the list with the amounts the media received for the campaign against the coronavirus with a three-month delay is explained by the list itself, which only became public on Monday," stated main opposition SYRIZA spokesperson Alexis Charitsis in an interview with Sto Kokkino radio on Tuesday.

"It is emphatically proved that there were no criteria related to the popularity and the number of media employees, on the contrary they had a political direction and were based on the media company's alignment with the ND government," stated Charitsis.

He added that the list makes SYRIZA even more suspicious and asked for the initial orders and invoices for the advertisements to be released, "in order to see if there was any tampering". He also accused the government of attempting to take advantage of the pandemic crisis in order to "blackmail and manipulate the media by handing out public money as it saw fit, in order to bend [the media] to its demands and its political line".

Speaking of the economy he said that the government had already passed laws dismantling labour relations rules from August 2019 and he said the government had pushed the economy back into recession before the outbreak of the pandemic.