Greeks. See NY Const. ARt. 1, Sec. 3
Greek Oligarch Is Arrested in Fraud Inquiry
By LIZ ALDERMAN
Published: December 13, 2012
In a rare show of muscle, Greek authorities on Thursday arrested
Lavrentis Lavrentiadis, a high-profile oligarch, at his home in an
affluent Athens suburb in a criminal case that has underscored growing
concerns in Greece over graft and crony capitalism.
Pantelis Saitas/European Pressphoto Agency
Lavrentis Lavrentiadis is accused of embezzlement from a bank he helped oversee.
Related
-
Court Seizes Assets of Greek Oligarch (December 13, 2012)
Prosecutors charged Mr. Lavrentiadis, 40, with embezzling from a bank he
helped oversee, Proton Bank, to prop up his struggling businesses. He
is also accused of fraud, money laundering and membership in a criminal
gang, charges that could carry a life term, a court official said.
Mr. Lavrentiadis, who built a multibillion-dollar empire only to see it
stumble in the Greek crisis, is expected to face an investigating
magistrate on Friday. A spokesman said he was not immediately available
for comment.
The arrest coincided with the approval of the release of a $45 billion
portion of aid from Greece’s European creditors, who have vigorously
pressed Athens to clean up the corruption that has been a root of the
country’s problems.
On Wednesday, an Athens court ordered the seizure of assets
belonging to Mr. Lavrentiadis and 29 of his former associates. The
ruling upheld an appeal by the shareholders of Proton Bank, once
majority-owned by Mr. Lavrentiadis, who claimed to have suffered major
losses after the lender allegedly issued hundreds of millions of dollars
in bad loans to dormant companies.
Few figures of Mr. Lavrentiadis’s stature have been prosecuted recently
in Greece. Greek news outlets on Thursday evening debated the
significance of the timing of the arrest, and whether efforts were being
made to make an example of Mr. Lavrentiadis.
As a relative upstart, Mr. Lavrentiadis had been working hard to gain
acceptance among the small circle of Greece’s ruling families,
contributing heavily to charities and buying media outlets. But in an interview recently, he raised the possibility that he was being sacrificed because he was still an outsider.
A court official said the timing was coincidental. “The investigation
reached fruition and it was time for his arrest,” the official said.
The Bank of Greece and Greece’s financial prosecutor had spent over a
year investigating Mr. Lavrentiadis and his associates. But a few months
ago, his name resurfaced as one of more than 2,000 Greeks appearing on
the so-called Lagarde list
of people said to have accounts in a Geneva branch of the bank HSBC.
The accounts are now the subject of an investigation into tax evasion, a
charge Mr. Lavrentiadis denies.
Prime Minister Antonis Samaras has sought to make examples of some cases
of suspected wrongdoing by high-profile figures. In September the
government began investigating the bank accounts of more than 30 Greek
politicians to determine whether they should be charged with tax
evasion.
But George Katrougalos, a Greek constitutional lawyer who is a fellow at
New York University, said the arrest was unlikely to represent the
beginning of a sustained campaign against suspected wrongdoers.
“Quite the opposite,” he said. “He’s being made a scapegoat for the
system to continue to be like it used to be, which is closed networks
between government and the economic elite, which are not transparent,
and no one knows what’s happening.”
Mr. Lavrentiadis has denied wrongdoing and dismissed the investigation
by the Bank of Greece as not objective. In the recent interview, he said
that he was “clean” and that he was being unfairly targeted.
No comments:
Post a Comment