The journalist who caused uproar in Greece by publishing the so-called “Lagarde list” of suspected tax evaders with bank accounts in Switzerland is due in court today on charges of infringing privacy laws.
Almost a year after he was acquitted of the crime, Kostas Vaxevanis will be in the dock again after a public prosecutor took the unusual step of demanding he be retried for revealing the identities of more than 2,000 wealthy Greeks with cash deposits in Geneva.
“What is at stake is the ability of a journalist to exercise his duty as a public watchdog in a case of major public interest,” his lawyer, Harris Ikonomopoulos, said.
Swiss bank
A closely guarded secret until it was printed by Vaxevanis in his investigative magazine Hot Doc last October, the list details the holdings of 2,059 Greeks at the Geneva branch of HSBC.
Christine Lagarde, the then French finance minister, handed the list to Greek authorities in October 2010 with the express purpose of pursuing tax offenders.
Ms Lagarde, now the IMF’s managing director, hoped it would shine a light on tax evasion, widely seen as the root of the debt-stricken country’s financial woes.
But instead of putting it to such use, her Greek counterpart George Papaconstantinou has been accused of deliberately failing to act on it.
This year the Greek parliament voted to send the former finance minister to court after MPs found there was enough evidence to suggest he had tampered with the dossier to remove the names of his relatives included in it.
“Other European countries that received similar lists from France investigated the persons and entities on them and collected a significant amount in taxes that had been evaded,” Mr Ikonomopoulos said.
“Vaxevanis published the Lagarde list after discovering that Papaconstantinou had received it and done nothing to investigate its content.”
Mr Papaconstantinou has vehemently denied that he erased the names of two of his cousins and their spouses.– (Guardian service)