The Supreme Court prosecution has initiated proceedings to send the file on the Novartis case to Parliament so that it can investigate possible criminal acts by political persons. The file was forwarded to the justice ministry after witnesses named political figures as having allegedly intervened in the investigation into the pharmeceutical company.
Supreme Court Deputy Prosecutor Evangelos Zacharis, who is investigating the case, has now stopped that line of inquiry and sent the file directly to the justice ministry, which must now forward the case to parliament within the next few days.
Following this, Zacharis and his colleague Lambros Sofoulakis will continue their preliminary investigation into the non-political figures involved in the case, examining witnesses and taking their testimony.
According to sources, among those who will be asked to testify is Bank of Greece governor Yiannis Stournaras, who had sued the corruption prosecutors in the past for involving his name in the Novartis investigation.
Meanwhile a new investigation will be launched by first-instance court prosecutors into the accusations made by Corruption Prosecutor Eleni Touloupaki against her supervisor in the Novartis case, Supreme Court Deputy Prosecutor Ioannis Aggelis.
This will investigate Touloupaki's report to her superiors at the Supreme Court, submitted in January 2019, in which she accused Aggelis of trying to "block" the Novartis investigation in various ways. She claims that on a trip to Vienna in 2018, where she was accompanied by Aggelis, the latter had declined to take evidence of interest to Greece from U.S. colleagues, urging them to send it via Eurojust. She also accuses him of twice illegally taking electronic files on Novartis and other cases under investigation, as well as original classified documents sent from the U.S., and of altering the requests she sent to the Public Administration Inspectors.
Touloupakis has been summoned to testify about her claims to first-instance court prosecutor Spiros Pappas on Tuesday.
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