By Matt Scott
December 2 – The Greek public prosecutors who declined to pursue charges against Olympiacos in the so-called Koriopolis match-fixing scandal have been accused of accepting bribes as they considered the case.
The mayor of Volos and owner of Olympiacos Volou, Achilleas Beos – who is one of 85 defendants in the Koriopolis trial – has lodged a claim through the Greek civil courts.
He alleges that Panagiotis Pouliou, a deputy public prosecutor, and Giannis Tzimplakis, who chaired the three-man panel of judges that considered whom to indict earlier this year, acted in bad faith in public office.
Beos’s claims were aired publicly through the Greek TV show Skai last month. He alleges that the purpose of the bribes, paid, he says, by a member of the executive team at Panathinaikos, was to ensure Evangelos Marinakis (pictured) would not be prosecuted in the Koriopolis trial.
Marinakis is the owner of Panathinaikos’s Athens rivals Olympiacos. Despite featuring heavily in the Koriopolis evidence file, he was not formally indicted. Beos claimed there were “significant suspicions of events that can reasonably and clearly… justify a bias in favour of one of my co-defendants, who [was] eventually acquitted.”
He added: “Under Article 237 Penal Code, if anyone who is called by law to perform judicial functions … requested or obtained, directly or through a third party, for himself or for another, any kind of unfair benefit for action or omission, in future or already completed, relating to the execution of their duties in the administration of justice or to resolve a dispute, shall be punished with imprisonment and a fine of EUR 15000-150000.”
Pouliou and Tzimplakis have not commented on Beos’s claim. However it is possible the allegations against the two public prosecutors may lead to a Greece’s highest court revisiting the pair’s decisions over whom to prosecute, and whom to clear. There have been unconfirmed reports in Greece that the prosecutor of the Athens Supreme Court, Efterpi Koutzamani, has ordered an investigation into the decisions following Beos’s allegations.
The Koriopolis trial is currently slated to take place in April 2016.
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