Peponis Sends "Lagarde List" To Parliament (VIDEOS)

Evangelos Venizelos (credit: Wikipedia)

The "Lagarde List" scandal is taking on a new twist. Financial Prosecutor Mr. Peponis apparently is now sending the case to the Greek parliament. As soon as the file is received in the Greek Parliament, an investigation will get underway in order to probe the handling of the list by former Finance Minister George Papakonstantinou as well as the present leader of PASOK Evangelos Venizelos. A report on SKAI television said earlier today that the list that will be sent to the Greek parliament... is not exactly the same list that was recently published in a Greek magazine.

A parliamentary investigation is now expected to be conducted led by Athanassios Nakos.

Peponis on Thursday confirmed that the list contains the names of New Democracy MP Giorgos Voulgarakis and his wife Katerina Peleki. At the weekend, Voulgarakis denied the allegations in a message on Twitter underlining that neither he, nor his wife have ever owned a bank account outside the country.

The alleged "Lagarde List" is an electronic file given in 2010 by then French finance minister Christine Lagarde to the Greek government. The list, named after the former French finance minister, contains more than 2,000 names of Greeks with substantial holdings in a Swiss branch of HSBC, a number of which are allegedly suspected of evading national taxes.

The Papandreou government, who received the electronic file, is accused of failing to take any action since it received the information. The list has drawn criticism from both opposition parties, as well as politicians within the governing coalition. Most comments link the failure to track down possible tax evasion by those on the list to the government’s preparations to introduce new austerity measures to secure international aid.

Kostas Vaxevanis, editor of the Greek magazine Hot Doc, published the so-called “Lagarde list” last week and was later arrested for apparently breaching Greece‘s data privacy law by revealing citizens’ private information.

On his part, Vaxevanis argues that he was simply exercising press freedom

In a challenge to Greek authorities, the TA NEA newspaper reprinted the names devoting ten pages to the list. The veteran socialist journal said it was not leaping to any conclusions about “its content nor the connotations it evokes in a large part of the public,” while the newspaper also noted that there was no evidence linking anyone on the list to tax evasion.

PASOK leader Evangelos Venizelos, who also served as Finance Minister after Papakonstantinou told officials in October that he had received the list in August 2011 from finance ministry officials and deemed that it couldn’t be legally used.

Nonetheless, and after much pressure, Venizelos handed it over to the government, which passed it on to the country’s financial crimes squad, SDOE.

George Papakonstantinou, who preceded Venizelos as finance minister, admitted receiving the list from Lagarde.