Greek web users waged Facebook war against IMF head Christine Lagarde yesterday after she accused their countrymen of dodging taxes.

The French managing director of the International Monetary Fund received more than 10,000 messages, many of them obscene, on her page on the online social network – where her postings typically draw a couple of hundred comments.

By late afternoon yesterday a separate Facebook page had sprung up titled “Greeks are against Lagarde”.

Its creators described it as “the page through which to show displeasure as a nation towards Lagarde!”, with a picture of the IMF chief.

Greeks accused Ms Lagarde on her page of belittling their suffering in an economic crisis that has seen salaries and pensions cut, in a recession now in its fifth year.

Ms Lagarde told Britain’s Guardian newspaper in an interview published on Friday that Greeks must “help themselves” by all paying taxes, saying she was more concerned about Africans in poverty than Greeks in the economic crisis.

“You should say that to the relatives of the 3,000 Greeks that have committed suicide, to the one million unemployed,” wrote a Facebook user under the nickname Ntavos Paok.

“You should tell your countrymen, who were many years in colonial Africa enriching themselves by stealing from the grandparents of the children you so hypocritically think of by comparing them with Greeks.”