A certain amount of confusion has been created on the issue of European Commission involvement in the agreement between Microsoft and the Greek government. I try to clear this up.
As far as I know, there is no reason why the signing of the agreement between a government and Microsoft would need to have any kind of approval by the Commission, or why the Commission would need to be aware of such an agreement. When a government of an EU member state makes any agreement with any vendor, the agreement must conform to the laws of the member state and to the laws of the European Union, and that is all.
The whole confusion started with a statement of George Alogoskoufis, then Minister of Economy and Finance, to the Greek Parliament, on 22 June 2007: "[W]e have sent [the Agreement] to the European Union so that we are certain that it is completely compatible with the rules of the European Union." According to that statement, it appears to be the government's unilateral decision to ask the "European Union" their opinion, and not any standard requirement.
In fact, the statement above is either meaningless or false. If you take it literally, it is meaningless: Mr Alogoskoufis said that "we have sent [the Agreement] to the European Union". Greece is part of the European Union, and therefore the Agreement was already in the European Union. The phrase makes as much sense as it would make if there was a hypothetical similar agreement in California, and the governor of California said "we have sent the Agreement to the United States". For the statement to be meaningful, the governor would need to be more specific, such as "we have sent the Agreement to the Federal Government". Several people have taken the phrase "European Union" in the government's statements to mean "European Commission", but the government never made it clear what they meant.
On 16 January 2008, we suggested to MPs to ask ten questions to the government (and it appears that they did), and one of the questions was "in which agency [of the European Union the Agreement] was submitted, and when? Which is the full text of the submission and the full text of the reply?" In other words, we wanted to know exactly what Mr Alogoskoufis had meant when he had made his statement. A few days later, on 24 January 2008, when some MPs of the opposition challenged the government to show the document that proves that the "European Union" agrees with the Agreement, Mr Ioannis Papathanassiou, then deputy Minister (and today Minister) of Economy and Finance, said: "Let me now reply to the last issue, the issue about the agreement of the European Union.... I said that there is agreement, I did not say that there is a document, because I do not know if there is a document, what I know is that there is agreement."
Until today, the above is the last thing we have heard from the government about the supposed agreement of the "European Union", and in my opinion it proves that there is no agreement of the "European Union", because I do not see any way in which an institution of the European Union could somehow agree with something other than by mentioning this agreement on a document. If we suppose that Mr Papathanassiou met someone in a corridor and showed them the Agreement and the someone said "well, John, this seems OK to me," you can't really call it "agreement of the European Union", but for all we can deduce from Mr Papathanassiou's statement, maybe this is what he meant when he said that the "European Union" agrees.
Therefore, all this (mis)information about the "European Union" supposedly agreeing or disagreeing with the Agreement is the vague statement by Mr Alogoskoufis, which is demonstrably meaningless at best, and demonstrably false at worst.
Of course, the European Commission was involved later when we submitted a complaint to the DG Internal Market that the Agreement violates EU law, but this is entirely different. The complaint documents the full story: it says, briefly, this is the Agreement signed by the Greek government, these are the submitters of the complaint, these are the reasons for which we have an interest in the case, and these are the reasons for which we think that the Agreement violates such-and-such EU law. Therefore, the complaint provides full documentation of the case for the Commission to examine, and is entirely unrelated to the supposed-EU-agreement rumours mentioned above, which it does not mention because they are of no concern to the case.
The full story about the Agreement, with links to the sources, can be found at http://www.ffii.gr/ms-gov-agreement-en/.
Antonis Christofides, 17 February 2009.
