WHO is to blame? Politicians and economists are all likely to be in the dock over the collapse of Laiki Bank, Cyprus’s second-largest. Nicos Anastasiades, the president, has now put three supreme court judges on the trail, telling them to report back on the whole affair by July. Some prominent Cypriots may be prosecuted; a few could even end up in jail.

One target of the investigation will be Michalis Sarris, the finance minister, who resigned on April 2nd after only five weeks in the job. His credibility sank after he agreed, in a first abortive round of bail-out negotiations with the European Union, to impose a “haircut” on small savers with less than €100,000 ($129,000) in their accounts. That would have reduced losses for wealthy Russian account holders whose business provides work for thousands of highly paid Cypriot lawyers and accountants. Mr Sarris then tried but failed to persuade Moscow to give Cyprus a €5 billion loan (on top of an earlier one of €2.5 billion), which could have rescued Laiki without any haircut at all.

The former World Bank technocrat also faces a grilling over his eight months as chairman of Laiki after it was nationalised last year. Mr Sarris searched in vain for a Russian or Chinese investor to take over the bank even as it was swallowing over €9 billion in emergency liquidity assistance from Cyprus’s central bank. He was subsequently unceremoniously sacked by Mr Anastasiades’s Communist predecessor as president, Demetris Christofias.

Charis Georgiades, the labour minister and former spokesman for Mr Anastasiades’s centre-right Democratic Rally party, is taking Mr Sarris’s place. He is inexperienced but also free of any close links with banks or Russian business.

Haravgi, a Communist newspaper, has published a list of 130 companies that had transferred more than €500m out of Laiki in the run-up to the meeting on March 15th when finance ministers of the euro zone agreed to impose the haircut on depositors. It claims that the firms had inside information that the deal was in the offing. Loutsios, a local car dealer, also emptied several accounts containing some €26m. Embarrassingly for Mr Anastasiades, his daughter, a lawyer in the family firm, is married to Yannos Loutsios, son of the dealership’s founder. Mr Anastasiades and the Loutsios family deny any wrongdoing.

A separate list, published by Ethnos, a left-wing Athens newspaper, has given details of loans by Laiki and Bank of Cyprus, the country’s biggest lender, to prominent Cypriot politicians and their friends, which have been quietly written off. The amounts range from €10,000 to €1.2m. Bank of Cyprus has survived (just) and will merge with Laiki after a restructuring, but its account holders may lose up to 60% of any deposits above €100,000.

On top of Laiki’s collapse, Cypriots are having to put up with the first capital controls in the euro zone (see article). Bank transactions are capped at €25,000, daily cash withdrawals are limited to €300 and cheques cannot be cashed. Panicos Demetriades, the central-bank governor, says the controls will be lifted within one or two weeks. That looks optimistic.