Greek socialists went on the offensive Thursday to shake off accusations they faked financial data to keep the country's public deficit in compliance with the eurozone's Maastricht criteria.

Greece's financial data from 1997-1999, on the basis of which Athens secured entry to the eurozone, will not suffer from the ongoing EU investigation into the country's past budget figures, former economy and finance minister Yiannos Papantoniou insisted here Thursday.

"The changes do not concern the years before 2000," Greece's former economy and finance minister Yiannos Papantoniou told a news conference. "There were no significant military orders at the time," he explained Papantoniou.

Papantoniou along with three other ex-ministers from the socialist governments that ruled Greece from 1993 to March 2004 rejected accusations from the ruling conservatives that they continuously massaged budget figures to press the public deficit below the EU-prescribed limit of three percent of output.

Speaking at a news conference, they accused in turn the government of cooking the books to tarnish the socialist record in power.

"This campaign by the new government has two aims: to discredit (the socialist party) PASOK and its tenure in office and to create an alibi for abandoning its extravagant pre-election promises," PASOK economic policy coordinator Theodore Pangalos said.

"We're proud of our economy," said Nikos Christodoulakis, finance minister from 2001 to March 2004.

A recent revision of Greece's post-2000 budget figures, conducted by Greece's incoming conservative government and approved in September by the EU statistical agency Eurostat, revealed that the country's public deficit consistently breached the EU limit of 3.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Eurostat sent a mission to Greece on Tuesday to check the country's 1997-1999 financial data, on the basis of which Athens secured eurozone entry in 2001.

Blaming the socialists for Greece's plight, conservative Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis charged that they had deliberately under-reported spending on defence procurements and the Athens Olympics while overestimating social insurance fund surpluses.

But Christodoulakis said Thursday that the revision reflected no change in the country's financial fundamentals, but resulted from the conservatives' "arbitrary and unilateral" decision to change the way payments for military equipments are recorded in the budget.

Soon after winning office in March general elections, the conservatives dropped the old practice of recording military expenses on an accrual basis -- in the year the material was delivered. Instead, they recorded them on a cash basis at the time the actual payments were made.

Retroactively applied to spending on a huge, 10-year armaments programme running since 1999, the bulk of which was paid for in 2000-2002, the change resulted in budget deficits exceeding the three percent deficit rule.

Both the accrual and the cash methods are accepted by Eurostat.

"The new government discovered no slush funds, no payment obligations that had been unaccounted for," Christodoulakis said.

Speaking to a European Parliament committee on October 5, Eurostat General Director Vanden Abeele said the conservatives changed the calculation method because they had no information on the exact delivery time of much of the military equipment ordered.

"This (finding out exact delivery dates) is an administrative problem and the (conservative) government should have been able to solve it," Papantoniou told the news conference.

The official delivery date of ordered military equipment often diverges from the day of its actual arrival because governments usually carry out checks on the incoming material before accepting it, he insisted.

According to Abeele, the switch from accrual to cash basis in relation to military spending explains between 25 and 90 percent of the increase in Greece's deficit each year between 2000 and 2003.