No problem with the rest of the piece, but it annoys me to no end that these sort of falsities have aquired status of received wisdom, of undisputable fact.

About the "lies": The Simitis government as well "lied" about the real numbers to join the Euro (and what a great idea that turned out to be....). In fact they were simply copying "creative accounting" tricks well established in Italy. Everybody in the EU knew at the time that this was nonsense, a cursory investigation would have shown it... yet nobody did anything about it.
BTW guess who was Governor of the Bank of Greece (and thus either complicit in playing with the numbers, or a fool) at precisely that time? Loukas Papademos, current PM and Merkozy / troika favorite...

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom - William Blake