ATHENS – “The Novartis case is a scandal and there is a court ruling on this,” main opposition SYRIZA-Progressive Alliance spokesperson Nassos Iliopoulos repeated in an appearance on Kontra channel late on Tuesday night. He said that the “government narrative of a frame-up” in relation to the Novartis case had collapsed, while calling on Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis “to apologise in person, primarily to the journalists that he had called a criminal gang”.

He pointed out that “Novartis has paid 350 million dollars in the United states for corrupt practices in Greece” and that the court ruling referred to “acts of corruption and bribery in the period prior to 2015, in order to influence the government’s decisions”. According to Iliopoulos, the “scandal concerns overpricing of pharmaceuticals and this cannot be done by doctors,” while he also criticised ruling New Democracy for disputing “a fundamental institution in the fight against corruption: public-interest witnesses” and of failing to bring the relevant European directive to Parliament even now.

“From the first moment, we insisted that we have a scandal and everything to date shows that this scandal is here. Greece must demand all the evidence that led to the conviction of Novartis in the United States. We had documents from which the names of politicians had been redacted,” he added.

Asked to clarify what SYRIZA leader Alexis Tsipras had meant when talking about “taking it to the end,” Iliopoulos replied that “justice will return to the country, the ‘unspecified’ sums will be specified, we will ask for all the evidence from U.S. authorities,” adding that justice would be permitted to do its job.