A former head of the Greek Financial Crimes Squad SDOE- refuting his own earlier testimony – has told a parliamentary committee investigating the handling of a list of 2,062 Greeks with $1.95 billion in secret Swiss bank accounts that he was under the impression it couldn’t be used to vet for possible tax cheats.
Yiannis Diotis is being questioned as part of the probe into former finance minister George Papaconstantinou after the names of three of his relatives were erased from the so-called Lagarde List culled from files stolen from the Geneva branch of HSBC by a former employee. It is named for former French finance minister Christine Lagarde, now head of one of Greece’s international lenders the International Monetary Fund, who gave it to Papaconstantinou in 2010. He said it disappeared while in the custody of his office.
Diotis had told MPs that he received a copy of the list on a USB device from Papaconstantinou in June 2011. On May 15, he claimed that the ex-finance minister did not suggest that the list would be used in an official capacity. Papaconstantinou has been criticized for not officially recording receipt of the list when it was sent by French authorities.
Diotis came under pressure after admitting late on May 14 that he had made an extra copy of the list that he had not admitted to until now. The ex-SDOE chief had insisted he made only one copy of the memory stick before destroying the original. However, he admitted that he had made a second copy, which he accessed on January 16, 2012 and then destroyed.
The major opposition party Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA) argued that the copies were made because data on the original CD, which has been lost, could not be altered and suggested that that government officials wanted to doctor the information on the Lagarde List.
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