According to information, the doctor is alleged to have demanded “fakelaki” in order to take special care of patients he had operated on and was supervising, with the amounts inside the envelopes reaching up to €5,000.
It should also be remembered that the director of the cardiac surgery clinic at Hippocrates had troubled the authorities in the past for a similar offense and had been initially sentenced to one year’s imprisonment with suspension, with that case still pending on appeal.
The testimony of the woman who reported Dimitris Lymperiadis
Mrs. Sofia, who handed the marked €3,000 to Mr. Lymperiadis, spoke on SKAI’s main news bulletin and described what the doctor told her:
“When I went in on Monday, September 1st, he said to me, ‘As you see, my girl, I don’t talk to you about money, what matters to me is that your husband gets well.’ Thursday afternoon my husband left the ICU and he took me and my daughter inside to inform us. He told my daughter to step outside and then said to me, ‘Listen Sofia, I usually take €5,000, for you, since it’s you, €3,000.’ And I was stunned and said, ‘What is happening?’ I said, ‘Doctor, what do you mean €3,000? I don’t have that much money on me.’ ‘Tomorrow then,’ he told me, ‘so I can also pay the others inside.’”
“He crushed me! I was stressed. My thoughts were how to find that money. Then I felt ashamed because I couldn’t have that money and then I wondered, where am I? In a private hospital? In a public one?” said Mrs. Sofia, revealing that inside she kept thinking: “And if I don’t give them? And if this happens? And if that happens? And if something happens to him?”
“I reached my limits. I have struggled since February 6 with my husband, he has multiple health problems and the last one was the heart. Not long ago we amputated a leg. After everything, after rehabilitation centers, we have bled financially, I cannot imagine also finding money and being stressed to pay a doctor who is already being paid,” she emphasized.
Mrs. Sofia has been with her husband since the age of 22 and says: “I don’t want to lose him for anything, that’s why I fight with tooth and nail. We are one. He (the doctor) realized it from the first moment. Whatever the situation, I was always there for him.
As for what the doctor said when she handed him the marked banknotes: “Alright Sofia, I’m going to give them to the others too.” She asked him if he wanted to count them and he replied, “No, I trust you.” Shortly afterward, he was arrested.