Yannos Papantoniou and wife remitted to custody for money laundering

Yesterday they were led handcuffed from the back door of the 6th building of the courts and were taken with a police van to the detention centers of the General Police Directorate, from where they are now being transferred to the prisons where they will be held.

A little earlier, the man who served for decades in PASOK's ministries of finance and defense - a symbol of an entire era - had been informed that a prosecutor had detained both him and his wife Stavroula Kourakou.

Journalists approached the Papantoniou couple while they were being escorted by police officers to the police station for a statement. "The tooling of Greek Justice jeopardizes Democracy - The Polakis doctrine is generally applied", were the words of the former minister who was jailed for laundering money from armament kickbacks.

Yannos Papantoniou had testified for a total of 16 hours to Corruption Investigators Iliana Zamianika and G. Evangelou for the offense of money laundering. For about five hours Mrs. Kourakou testified for the same offense.

Investigators accuse Papantoniou of receiving a kickback of 2.8 million Swiss francs to "give" to a specific company the contract for upgrading six S-type frigates.

This is the contract 010B / 03 signed on 6.2.2003 for the modernization of the average life of six S-type fighters of the Navy with contractors Hellenic Shipyards SA - as main contractor and subcontractor THALES NEDER LAND B.V. and the Ministry of Defense. In particular, the indictment reports that the former minister received the money as a gift to give the contract to the French company THALES, as well as another relating to the compensatory benefits that arose from it.

In fact, the investigators consider the 2,8 million Swiss francs part of an amount of about four million Swiss francs available to favor this particular substitute over others. The damage to the Greek state, according to the indictment, totals 400 million euros.

Seven accounts have been identified in Swiss banks and dozens of sub-accounts through which the money was moved, with the aim of eliminating their trails. In fact, a co-beneficiary of some of these accounts is Stavroula Kourakou, who was for this reason also found guilty and now temporarily detained.

During his marathon depositon to the investigators Yannos Papantoniou received a host of questions about the origin of the money but also about each of these contracts. According to information, he allegedly claimed that this money is "clean" and that the contract for the upgrading of the frigates benefited and did not harm the Greek state with 400 million euros as the indictment says.

"After 15 years of investigations, there has been absolutely no indication of illegal operation, no money, no bank flow, no evidence of illegal transactions", Papantoniou said to the investigators, adding: "The Swiss accounts, which I immediately and voluntarily put at the disposal of the judicial authorities, were proven after a thorough investigation to be spotlessly clean. They were, moreover, opened thirty-five years ago, in the early 1980s when I lived and worked abroad. "

The line of refuting charges was followed by Stavroula Kourakou in her deposition.