Migration and Asylum Minister Thanos Plevris pushed back Friday on opposition claims about his relationship with the doctor charged in singer Giorgos Mazonakis’s death, flatly denying any professional partnership and insisting their connection began in 2016, not 2012 as PASOK has alleged, and on different terms than the party has described.
Speaking on MEGA radio, Plevris rejected the idea that he and the doctor had worked together in any capacity. “What cooperation are you talking about? There is no cooperation,” he said. The minister claimed that the two of them had crossed paths in the past through a professional association that, according to him, had dozens of members and has since become inactive, an apparent reference to the Greek Medical Legal Council that PASOK said Friday the two men helped found together in 2012.
“I have been his patient”
Plevris said the defining fact of his relationship with the doctor, who is now jailed pending trial alongside his wife, is that he became his patient in 2016, after developing a serious health problem. “I knew the man socially, but I got to know him as a doctor during my 2016 health ordeal,” he said, adding that he had been introduced to the doctor by another person. “The main point of our relationship is that he has been my doctor,” he said.
He described the doctor as an internist with additional training in hematology, and said of the doctor’s wife, who is also facing charges, only that “I know that he is a doctor and she is his wife.”
Plevris said he had already publicly disclosed knowing the doctor before any of the scrutiny began, and rejected the suggestion that he tried to conceal the relationship.”I volunteered that information myself, with nothing to hide. Obviously, if you call someone, it means you know them,” he said.
No plasmapheresis, Plevris says
Addressing the specific treatments under investigation in the Mazonakis case, Plevris said the doctor never suggested he undergo plasmapheresis, the blood filtering procedure at the center of the case, and said he would not have agreed to it if asked. “He didn’t propose plasmapheresis type treatments to me, and I wouldn’t have done it,” he said. He added that he was unaware such treatments were being carried out at the clinic at all. “I don’t know that such treatments were happening, nor did he ever propose them to me,” he said.
On the medical advice he did receive, Plevris said the doctor recommended supplements from established companies alongside, not in place of, the treatment he was already following under his own physician, whom he said had confirmed the recommendations were sound. “Whatever advice he gave me was good advice. I confirmed it with my own doctor. He gave me products from well known companies,” he said.
Plevris said he had never visited the doctor’s clinic in his capacity as health minister, a post he held before his current portfolio, and sought to draw a clear line between his personal acquaintance with the doctor and his time in government. He stopped short of ruling out any chance encounter outside that context, however, saying, “As health minister I haven’t gone to his practice, but I don’t know if I ran into him somewhere and said hello.”
Source: TA NEA
