Manolis Christodoulakis, a member of parliament for Greece's PASOK party, has responded to a report in the newspaper Dimokratia alleging that his family's company received public contracts worth at least 9 million euros since 2019. He denounced the report as "staged" and "slanderous," saying he was being personally and politically targeted.
In a post responding to the report, Christodoulakis said he would never engage, directly or indirectly, with what he called the mud and those who wallow in it out of habit or necessity. He said he had never been frightened by personal targeting from systems and interests that serve corrupt centers and mechanisms in the manner of a sewer.
He pointed to a statement issued by Datamed on the matter and said the attack would not change his political stance. He said that if anyone believed this approach would make him bend, compromise, or water down his positions, they were deeply mistaken.
Christodoulakis also linked the report directly to the internal and broader political debate over PASOK's strategy, repeating his support for the party's political autonomy. He said he had backed, with passion and at personal cost, the case for political autonomy for his political camp, both formally at PASOK's party congress and in his public appearances, and said he would not retreat an inch from that position.
Christodoulakis's full statement
In the post, Christodoulakis said he was proud to carry, alongside PASOK and thousands of known and anonymous activists in every city, village and neighborhood of Greece, the banner of political change. He said his dreams and ambitions were for his party to grow strong and for political change in the country to become reality through a PASOK victory in the coming elections, and that these were fueled only by the love, friendship and solidarity of those who share the same concerns and dreams, which he said could not be bought or traded like what he called staged newspaper reports.
He said he was not the only PASOK figure being targeted, but that all party officials who make the movement inconvenient for those who want it small, manageable and complementary faced the same treatment, and said this would never happen. He said his critics could come at him however they wished, adding that he knew they had many ways, but that he would remain in place.
Because the accusations needed to be answered on their substance, Christodoulakis referred readers to a statement issued by Datamed regarding what he called Dimokratia's slanderous front page that day.
Datamed's response on the contracts
Datamed rejected the content of the Dimokratia report, arguing that the newspaper presented as direct awards what were in fact maintenance and technical support contracts for systems and applications the company had installed at public bodies following tenders.
Regarding the "negotiation without prior publication" procedure specifically, the company said it applied to projects for which it owns the relevant software and holds the necessary expertise. As a result, it said, subsequent maintenance and support contracts could not, for reasons of technical uniqueness, be awarded to a different contractor. Datamed said the opposite would be not only illegal but technically impossible, adding that it had followed the same practice before the period covered by the report, which it said undermined any attempt to attach political characteristics to the contracts. It called the suggestion of an unlawful process purely slanderous.
The company said that during the period examined by the newspaper, it received one contract through direct award, from an organization where its systems and applications were already installed. It said the award was made during the height of the pandemic, due to emergency circumstances, and through what it described as an entirely legal procedure. Datamed also rejected any attempt to link its business activity to a specific government, noting that it has operated for three decades in Greece and abroad and has worked with the Greek state under governments of different political stripes.
Datamed said that unless some believe a company's ability to operate in Greece today should depend not on its long-standing competence in the services it provides but on the political identity of its participants, any suggestion of political dependency was purely slanderous. The company said it reserved the right to pursue every legal means to protect its standing and credibility.
What Dimokratia reported about Christodoulakis
Dimokratia's report claimed that Datamed, whose chairman and chief executive it identified as Christodoulakis's father and whose board includes his brother, has received at least 9 million euros from public contracts since 2019. The newspaper put the number of contracts at more than 170, saying a significant portion came through either direct awards or negotiation without prior publication.
Dimokratia described the 9 million euro figure as a conservative estimate, saying there may be additional contracts. The newspaper also sought to link Christodoulakis's professional background to the company's field, citing his studies at the National Technical University of Athens' School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with a focus on software, computing systems and biomedical engineering, as well as his professional work in health informatics.
