Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras took to Facebook on Thursday to categorically deny that his late father, Pavlos, was friendly with and benefitted, as a construction contractor, from the military junta that ruled Greece with an "iron grip" between 1967 to 1974.
In an uncharacteristically emotional and lengthy post on social media, Tsipras denied claims by his political rival, made in Parliament a day earlier by ND leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis, that his father won state contracts during the period as the owner of a construction firm called Skapaneas.
The back-and-forth personal attacks between Tsipras and Mitsotakis from Parliament's podium on Wednesday were extreme even by Greek political standards.
Tsipras said he father, in fact, was jailed for a month on suspicion of providing TNT for bomb against the junta establishment in Crete, and even left Greece in 1972 to work as a civil engineer in Saudi Arabia.
