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Another Greek company has fallen under Article 99 of the Bankruptcy Code but this time it is neither a supermarket chain nor hotels. The company is ΙΜΑΚΟ, owned by the publisher of fashion, gossip and yellow news magazines, Petros Kostopoulos. He has officially announced bankruptcy. The property of the company was retained until it becomes clear how creditors will split what is left of the publishing empire of Kostopoulos.

Unlike other entrepreneurs who failed to sustain the economic crisis, Petros Kostopoulos decided to leave the arena with a dramatic tone, declaring bankruptcy in an open letter, which the media called "the confession of Kostopoulos"! In it, he compares the collapse with the death of a child from his family, and defines it as a personal failure, "although the conditions under which the publishing sector is developing are ruinous," said Kostopoulos, adding "I gave what I had to save the company." After some protracted and slightly chaotic explanations of how his brilliant career as a publisher ended, Kostopoulos, as a model citizen, thanked his wife Jenny Balatsinou. He called her a rock, on which he could lean and did not fail to note that now his only job is the TV show on Antenna, meaning, "we will make only a scanty livelihood."

Lakis Gavalas, who has also come within the provisions of law, published in his Twitter profile: "I sympathize with ΙΜΑΚΟ and the employees there ... Nobody starts a business to end up in this situation... Good luck to all of us and especially to the employees ... " The irony is increased by the fact that the employees in the companies which are under Article 99 had not been paid salaries months before the owners declared bankruptcy officially, although they e had pledged to pay them sooner or later. Another thread connecting Gavalas and Kostopoulos despite their infamous failures is their annual parties in Mykonos and Athens, which, even in the wake of the crisis, cannot be defined as either modest or low budget.

The response to the confession of Kostopoulos by the employees of ΙΜΑΚΟ was not late in coming. It does not paint the same tragic-romantic picture in which a publisher on a white horse has lost the battle with the dragon of the economic crisis after a bloody fight. On the contrary, the employees make it clear that not only has Kostopoulos not paid their salaries for months but he had also even promised them that they would be paid (one day) before the company went bankrupt. "Dozens of workers are ΙΜΑΚΟ hostages. They have not been paid for months, and employees with more flexible contracts have not been paid for a year," reads the address of employees in Nitro, People, InStyle and other publications under the management of Kostopoulos. Employees in the offices of the company said that experts and police had entered the building of ΙΜΑΚΟ on Tuesday and began to describe the objects one by one to attach them. Coincidentally or not, just weeks before the event, Petros Kostopoulos had taken care to move his personal office along with the valuable items to another address, the employees stated in their address.