Former President Nicos Anastasiades will hold a press conference at 11am on Tuesday at the Journalists House, where he is expected to respond to findings by the Anti-Corruption Authority recommending he face criminal scrutiny on seven counts.
The Authority’s four investigating inspectors recommended Anastasiades be examined for three counts of trading in influence, one felony count of abuse of power, and three counts of abuse of power as a misdemeanour or attempted criminal offence.
Anastasiades signalled the broad outlines of his response in a written statement last Tuesday, hours after the Authority announced its findings. He said the allegations made by Makarios Drousiotis in his book Mafia State had “collapsed as unfounded,” and indicated he would present documentary evidence at the press conference to challenge both the book’s claims and the report’s findings.
In his statement, Anastasiades said that most of the charges attributed to the investigating officers and the Anti-Corruption Authority were not only absent from the allegations under investigation in Drousiotis’s book, but had never been put to him during the investigative process, denying him the opportunity to submit documented responses.
He also called for immediate investigation by the competent authorities and recommended that Attorney General Giorgos Savvides and Deputy Attorney General Savvas Angelides be excluded from oversight of the proceedings. Both were appointed to their current posts by Anastasiades and previously served in his government as Justice Minister and Defence Minister respectively.
A constitutional question has also arisen in recent days over whether Article 45 of the Constitution permits criminal scrutiny of a former president without a Supreme Court ruling lifting immunity. Legal opinion is divided on the point.
Report delivered to Attorney General and Tax Commissioner
The Anti-Corruption Authority delivered its report and evidentiary material to the Attorney General on Monday morning. The report runs to approximately 3,000 pages and is stored in four archive boxes. The evidentiary material was transmitted digitally via portable storage device, while original documents remain in the Authority’s secure evidence room.
A copy of the report without the evidentiary material was separately delivered to Tax Commissioner Sotiris Markides. The tax investigation will focus on the data of seven individuals whom the report recommends for criminal scrutiny: Anastasiades, Rikkos Erotokritou, Haris Solomonides, Nikos Kouyialis, Giorgos Varnavas, Eva Rossidou Papakyriakou, and Ioannis Sotiriades.
Cabinet may appoint independent investigators
Delivery of the report to the Law Office opens the way for the Council of Ministers to appoint one or more independent criminal investigators, according to Government Spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis.
Letymbiotis said last Wednesday that the Cabinet intended to make such appointments, subject to the steps that would follow once the full report was formally transmitted by the Anti-Corruption Authority to the Law Office.
As of Monday, there was no clear indication whether the Council of Ministers would put forward names of candidate lawyers at its next session for a final decision, according to sources cited by Phileleftheros.
The case of Erotokritou, a former Deputy Attorney General convicted in the Providencia case on March 1, 2017 and sentenced to three and a half years in prison, was previously cited as a precedent for the use of independent investigators outside the Law Office. In that case, Panagiotis Kallis was appointed as criminal investigator, while Elias Stefanou and Savvas Angelides — now Deputy Attorney General — served as private prosecutors.
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