Photo: iefimerida.gr
Police arrested two associates of the ill-fated businessman Laurentios Laurentiadis as they tried to thwart the blockade by the employees of Gerolymatos Cosmetics, a subsidiary of Alapis. Kostas Christides and Frank Sekoula said they were representatives of the management, but have not specified of which company. Like most things around Lavrendiadis, the ownership of the company Gerolymatos Cosmetics is also questionable. It has not become clear whether Christides and Sekoula came as representatives of the company Ballis Home Care, which had been purchased by Gerolymatos Cosmetics from Alapis with a fake loan from Proton Bank (Laurentiadis holds a stake in the companies named) or if they presented Mideas Holdings Limited that, according to Proton Bank, had bought the cosmetics company illegally.
No matter in what capacity Kostas Christides and Frank Sekoula had appeared there, the striking employees called the police and complained about a violation of their labour rights and the two representatives were arrested.
In the summer of 2010, Laurentios Laurentiadis decided to sell the eight subsidiaries of Alapis to focus the parent company's attention on its establishment in the market for pharmaceutical products. The companies were sold for a total of € 144 million and the funds for the purchase have turned out to be loans from Lavrentiadis’ Proton Bank. In the case of Gerolymatos Cosmetics, Konstantinos Ballis purchased it together with the company Beauty Works, for which he had taken a loan worth € 77.2 million from Proton Bank. Ballis Home Care controls both companies.
The revelations about the relations between the transactions require some changes. On the one hand, the assets of Lavrentiadis and Ballis were frozen. On the other, the new Proton Bank, which has been established only with the healthy assets of the old discredited bank under the supervision of the Bank of Greece wants back the money allocated as loans for suspicious transactions. Allegations are that Ballis Home Care has illegally transferred the full stake of Gerolymatos Cosmetics to the company Mideas Holdings Limited, the management of which is unidentified.
Gerolymatos Cosmetics’ employees have been left without salaries due to management irregularities and in a protest, have blocked the warehouses of the company in Kryoneri and the production facility in Markopoulo for about a week now. Christides and Sekoula have visited the employees in order to calm them and make them stop the blockade. However, they were unable to give any decent explanation of the actual ownership of Gerolymatos Cosmetics and of the fate of its 337 employees.