George Papaconstantinou accused of removing relatives’ from list of suspected tax evaders and could face life sentence if convicted of crime against the state

A new front in Greece’s unfolding economic drama has opened in Athens as the former finance minister, George Papaconstantinou, was brought before a special tribunal accused of tampering with a public list of tax evaders and attempted breach of faith.

Facing a panel of judges convened for the hearing, the man most associated with Greece’s first international bailout cut a lonely figure as he pleaded not guilty.

“I am innocent, your honour,” he said addressing the presiding court judge seated on the uppermost bench of an antechamber of court officials. “I deny all the charges.”

Greece had been waiting for this moment. Papaconstantinou, 53, stands accused of removing the names of three of his relatives from a catalogue of some 2,062 suspected tax evaders handed to him by Christine Lagarde, his French counterpart at the time.

Lagarde, now head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), had passed on the list of names – all account holders at the Geneva branch of HSBC – with the express purpose that the prospective offenders be pursued. At more than €20bn a year, tax avoidance is by far the biggest single drain on the country’s debt-stricken economy with Athens’ new leftist-led government vowing to crack down on it as never before.

Papaconstantinou, who was finance minister between October 2009 and June 2011 under the socialist premier, George Papandreou, faces a life sentence if convicted. The alleged offences include the aggravating factor of being seen as crimes against the state.

Dressed in a dark suit and flanked by lawyers on either side, the former politician – once regarded as the face of hope and reform in Greece – sat motionless as the court proceedings got under way.

Papaconstantinou is the first Greek politician to be tried before a special criminal court in over two decades. It was in the same wood-pannelled room in March 1991 that the then socialist premier Andreas Papandreou was also put on trial.

Papaconstantinou, an urbane economist who spent more than half of his life abroad before returning to Greece to become involved in politics, claims he has been “framed” by an establishment desperate to be seen meting out punishment to politicians perceived to have brought the nation to the brink of economic collapse. During his 20 months in office, he says, he introduced some of the country’s most draconian tax legislation.

But Athens also stands alone in failing to act on the so–called “Lagarde list” – initially stolen by a renegade bank clerk at HSBC before being seized by French police.



After six years of wrenching recession on the back of near bankruptcy, the inventory has instead come to represent the inequities of a crisis in which the vast majority have been hit by punishing austerity – the price of €240bn in aid from the EU and IMF – and the wealthy allowed to get off scot free.

The extent to which the international moneyed elite was enabled by HSBC’s Swiss operations to avoid taxes was recently revealed by the Guardian and other news outlets.

Much of trial is expected to focus on whether Papaconstantinou deliberately excised the names of his cousin Eleni Papaconstantinou, her arms dealer husband and the spouse of her sister Marina, when he ordered the data to be transferred from a CD containing the original information to a USB memory stick “for security reasons”.

The three missing accounts were discovered when Greek officials subsequently obtained a fresh copy of the list.

“Was it usual for the minister to spend time late at night in his office?” one of Papaconstantinou’s lawyers asked his chef de cabinet, Chryssi Hadzi, as she stood in the dock. “Would the [then] minister have had cause to open the files?” he continued hinting that some cunning schemer could easily have set him up.

On Wednesday, as history repeated itself in the room reserved for special cases in Athens’ supreme court, the judges sat stony-faced at the start of a trial that to great degree will ponder that question.

The trial is expected to last several weeks.