Galery

1

The life imprisonment, to which the court in Thessaloniki has sentenced former mayor Vassilis Papageorgopoulos for the embezzlement of municipal funds has caused mixed feelings among the public. It turns out that he was not the only mayor who had dared to lay hands on municipal funds. There are hundreds of cases in which occupants of municipal services, regardless of their rank, embezzled and wasted state money.

Today, the prosecutor’s office in Thessaloniki has launched another criminal persecution against former governor Panagiotis Psomiadis. The indictment indicates 456 orders for the execution of projects which were "broken into pieces" with a budget of up to 45 thousand euro in order for them to be assigned directly rather than through a competition.

Panagiotis’ brother and former deputy governor, Dionisis Psomiadis, the former director of the technical department of the district government and another 30 employees, members of the district council and contractors are defendants in the same case.

The charges, which are different for each of them, include violation of duties, incitement to breach of duties, false statements and incitement to giving false statements. All are felonies under the law under which the former mayor of Thessaloniki has been sentenced.

Such cases often reach the courtrooms in the form of charges of violations while in office, illegal awarding of municipal contracts using the method of project breaking in order to avoid a competition, misuse of public funds, mismanagement or actions against society.

The anti-financial crime service summoned many former governors and municipal advisors. Their bank accounts were opened and property declarations were verified due to doubts that they concealed taxes, and that their improved financial status does not correspond to their income.

Meanwhile, the chief auditor of public administration Leandros Rakindzis is preparing his annual report on corruption in state bodies. Local government authorities are holding the lead in the statistics for another consecutive year. The most common violations that auditors have found are issuing false invoices, violating the law on environment protection, irregularities in the implementation of technical projects, violations in the administrative records and profiteering.

The chief auditor states that he often had to seek the annulment of administrative decisions that had excused the "transgressing" employees. In one such case, the inspectors found that the acquitted person had acquired an amount of 353,972 euro within eight years, without being able to prove that this had happened in a lawful manner.

Some were not even ashamed of stealing money given in memory of the 21 students who had died in a car crash in 2003. On 17 February this year, the Court of Appeal in Thessaloniki announced the initiation of a lawsuit against the former mayor and former cashier of a municipality in the Imathia district, Apostolos Pavlos, for the embezzlement of 1.3 million euro between 2003 and 2006. The state lottery OPAP had donated part of this amount – 300 thousand euro, for the building of a sports centre in the village of Makrihori, where the school of the deceased teenagers is. The sports centre was never built. The controlling authorities began investigating in 2007 and the report published two years later showed a large hole in the municipal funds. The former mayor denied the allegations, stating that the money was given for the implementation of projects and staff salaries.

The former mayor of Kilkis Vangelis Balaskas was accused of involvement in a network that had issued cards for free transport services to bogus disabled. In just two years - 2007-2008, 10,211 such cards were issued in this region and their respective holders used the transport services for free. The actual number of disabled people in the area of ​​Kilkis was five times less and the damage to the funds of the district administration was 1 million euro. In January this year, the former governor and mayor of Kilkis today was suspended to five years in prison. Although a distraint on his duties as a mayor has been levied, he still insists on his innocence until the criminal court takes its final decision.

Such cases are common in municipalities and regional governments throughout Greece. Economic inspectors have initiated them in some places and they are the result of alerts by citizens in others. There are also cases in which the violations have emerged during inspections required by the municipal councils to establish whether the previous administrations of local governors had functioned conscientiously and transparently.