Giannis Varoufakis attempted on Tuesday morning to respond to the accusations made by Alexis Tsipras in his book “Ithaca.”

According to Varoufakis, Tsipras “is trying to disguise guilt as naivety,” adding sarcastically, “I have many books to read — I think I’ll wait for the movie.”

He also took a jab at the former prime minister, saying on ERT: “Once Margaret Thatcher was asked ‘what was your greatest achievement?’ and she replied: ‘Labour’s Tony Blair.’ If you ask today’s most hard-core troika supporters the same question, they’ll answer: Alexis Tsipras. He tries to pass meat off as fish and to present the ignorance he admits he had as naïveté.”

According to the head of MeRA25, “Tsipras paved the way for Mitsotakis. This rebranding effort, which is an interesting attempt to distort what happened, is worth reading for anyone who wants to judge.”

He added that “Tsipras was right — in the final days he had given everything. They didn’t just want him to sign a memorandum; they wanted to humiliate him. They made him hold a referendum so he could appear democratic, and that’s why he was gloomy that night — because the ‘No’ won. On 21 June, when I was no longer part of the negotiating team and attended the Eurogroup as an honorary member, he had already given them everything, and they kept demanding more, because they wanted him to suffer for people like me. The question was: you have a people supporting us against the entire media system that warned Armageddon would come if ‘No’ prevailed — and Tsipras all that time hoped to mislead the people into believing he supported ‘No’ so they would vote ‘Yes,’ and ultimately join the troika bloc. That was the greatest blow to democracy and the Left.”

On the “coupons”

Varoufakis was asked about Tsipras’s reference to coupons for pensioners, and he replied: “When I heard what he wrote about the IOU, I laughed bitterly. No one spoke of coupons. That pioneering payment system based on Taxisnet, which has been applied in countries like Brazil, was far ahead of its time — calling it coupons is self-humiliating.”

“The implementation of this specific public payments system was a condition I set for him in November 2014, in the meeting with Dragasakis, for me to take over the Finance Ministry — something he now trivializes by saying I learned about it at the end. I even have the emails I sent them from Texas,” Varoufakis added.

“The title was ‘public system of off-bank payments through Taxisnet.’ It’s like calling a Tesla a Fiat. To demean it by calling it coupons is one of the reasons I won’t read the book. Right now in Frankfurt they’re discussing the digital euro. That is the system I proposed. Presenting it as coupons he heard about at the end of the six-month period only proves the man’s quality,” he continued.

However, he admitted: “I have made many mistakes, and the biggest was the February agreement. I have made communication mistakes too. The Paris Match thing was stupidity, and I apologize to my wife, Danae Stratou — and I will apologize forever.”

As for Tsipras’s criticism of that photoshoot, Varoufakis said: “These things are said by a man who took the mandate of the referendum, threw it in the trash, dismantled SYRIZA, and now wants the people to trust him for a program that doesn’t exist, for a party that doesn’t exist, based solely on ‘I am who I am.’ He wants to criticize based on vanity.”

Sarcastically, he added, “Tsipras wants to become prime minister — fair enough. It’s fair for someone to want to break the world record in the 100 meters at the Olympics, but it’s not easy for me to do it at 65.”

On the government of the first half of 2015

He said: “We had the Kammenos people inside, but we also had excellent people. The only reason we were elected was because the country had gone bankrupt. Imagine entering the Finance Ministry, holding a meeting at the General Accounting Office, asking how many days we have left, and being told: ‘it’s not that bad — 11 to 23 days.’ How can a government function seriously like that? Until then, from May 2010, all governments had one idea: get the next credit card — the Memorandum — to pay off the previous one. We were elected to haircut the debt, not to get a new credit card. I had to find €22.5 billion for repayments. So-called ‘haircutting’ the debt was the main reason I entered the Finance Ministry.”

He concluded by saying: “Since 2011 I’ve said I don’t want a return to the drachma — just as no serious defense minister wants war, but prepares for it. We don’t want to exit the euro, but saying the worst thing is leaving the euro is utter nonsense. The worst thing is for the country to become desertified inside the euro and become like Kosovo is today. Euros come out of ATMs, but you have no room to maneuver.”