Greek Prosecutors Say Middlemen Interfered in Their Cases

ATHENS – Two Greek financial prosecutors who earlier resigned after complaining about political interference with their work – and then quickly returned – have stated that politicians and business executives used go-betweens to pressure them to speed up or drop cases they were investigating, but still did not name the go-betweens despite earlier promises. Grigoris Peponis and Spyros Mouzakitis suggested that although politicians and businessmen did not try to exercise influence over their investigations directly, they did so through third parties, according to the newspaper Kathimerini. They were appointed in May to probe into financial crimes, including tax evasion, which is costing the country more than $60 billion. The pair gave testimony to Supreme Court prosecutor Fotis Makris, who reopened his investigation into allegations that the prosecutors’ work was being disrupted.
Sources told Kathimerini the two prosecutors submitted written testimony in which they did not single out the politicians responsible for exercising unwarranted pressure on the judicial process, but said that officials and third parties occasionally expressed strong opinions about their investigations, asking for some to be sped up and others to be dropped. Mouzakitis and Peponis said they were approached in connection to three cases by people who expressed the concerns or praise of politicians and other figures. Sources said the judicial officials named some individuals that came to see them in their offices – including a journalist and several lawyers – to convey the sentiments of a third party.
One of the three cases the prosecutors mentioned is thought to be their investigation into claims of statistics being manipulated at the Hellenic Statistical Authority (ELSTAT) in 2009, to present Greece as having a bigger public deficit than it actually did, a charge vehemently disputed by ELSTAT’s head, Andreas Georgiou, a former top statistics official for the International Monetary Fund (IMF), one of the country’s international lenders providing rescue funds to keep the country from going bankrupt. He said he is being unfairly prosecuted for telling the truth about the country’s dire economic condition, and his reports have been accepted by the European Union.
Peponis and Mouzakitis have been handling a number of other high-profile cases, including major tax evasion, claims that tax officials did not collect fines on fuel trading firms, banks’ funding of bankrupt Alter TV, the continued financing of indebted political parties by banks, and claims of corruption at tax offices. Makris is set to call the two prosecutors for more questioning on Jan. 9. The fuel smuggling scandal has already led to the resignation of a top customs official who denied he did anything wrong, and the prosecutors are trying to tighten the screws on financial improprieties in a country where the rich elite and political leaders have enjoyed near-impunity for wrongdoing for generations.
Peponis had earlier complained he had to wait months for Finance Minister Evangelos Venizelos to provide information on tax evaders, and a list of some 6,000 still has not been released despite continued promises on Venizelos’ part to do so. The Troika of the European Union-IMF-European Central Bank is providing Greece with $152 billion in rescue loans to stay afloat while a coalition government led by former ECB Vice-President Lucas Papademos is trying to negotiate a second bailout of $169 billion, without which the country will go broke, and trying to get investors to accept losses of 50-65 percent of funds they gave Greece.