Goldman Sachs: I should have checked rather than relying on memory; indeed the main deal with Goldman Sachs was in the years 2001-2005 and a heritage of the Simitis government. I conflated it with GS's 2009 attempt to advise the Greek government again, this time the freshly elected Papandreu government, but they didn't listen. (I find though in the article that in 2008, GS advised the Karamanlis government in another legal trickery regarding the swaps from 2001.)

If they were lying, then the published Eurostat figures showing 100-105% through the decade were wrong, correct?

Have you checked the link again? Yes, the debt figures were wrong and they were revised.

how does the Greek debt rise to ONLY 115% with a 15% yearly deficit in 2009?

You are confusing 2008 and 2009, and your data seems not up to date. In Eurostat's current data, the lowest debt to GDP ratio was in 2003 (when GDP grew 5.9%) at 97.4%, which grew to 113.0% in 2008 (GDP: -0.2%, start of recession). Then in 2009 (GDP: -3.3%), it jumped to 129.3%.

As I indicated, it seems true however that total debt and deficit are derived from different estimates (thus the deficit-hiding doesn't directly appear in the debt and the debt-hiding doesn't directly appear in the deficit). It's hard to check up on this, because change in debt should also be affected by exchange rate effects and other financial niceties (and possibly a host of other factors I'm ignorant about), but here is another series I derived from Eurostat data -- deficit vs. change in debt, both in million Euros:

Year	2000	2001	2002	2003	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Change in debt	18636	10898	7345	8811	15132	12264	28783	15096	23831	36406	29814
Deficit	5093	6542	7465	9738	13940	10068	12109	14475	22822	36624	24125

Some years the deficit exceeds the debt increase, but you see that overall, in the past decade, debt was actually growing by more than the cumulative deficit. The "interesting" years are 2000, 2001, 2006, and 2010.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}