Novartis Scandal

The parliamentary committee probing possible abuse of power by the ex-alternate justice minister must operate without vindictiveness despite the rage over what was billed as the greatest scandal since the establishment of the Greek state.

Who offered these individuals the status of protected witnesses with immunity from prosecution in order to receive so little –mere rumours – and on whose orders?

On the one hand Parliament must probe to find the truth and on the other it must ensure the legal and constitutional order. The one is a precondition for the other.

The disappearance of the protected witnesses and the subsequent inability of police to track them down according to critics raised questions about the competence of state organs.

Pikrammenos opined that it was Papaggelopoulos who was pulling the strings in planning the prosecution of ten prominent politicians, including former PM Antonis Samaras.

If the country is to return to normalcy such dubious practices and dark machinations must end once and for all.

Now that the Novartis scandal has boomeranged, the PM and the government are all either keeping silent or blaming the delays in the judicial process.

Ex-Deputy Supreme Court Prosecutor in open letter outlines a string of procedural violations and alleges targeted prosecution of politicians without the necessary evidence in the Novartis case.

To Vima on Sunday reported yesterday that Corruption Prosecutor Eleni Touloupaki (photo) has told the Judicial Council that she expects the case to be wrapped up within the next six months.

The moderate and soft-spoken former president of Greece’s Council of State evoked great sympathy from the public when he teared while defending himself and his decades-long unblemished public service.

In a document released by the Movement for Change today at its weekly press briefing, the centre-left party enumerates five facts that it claims establish that the focus on opposition politicians in  the Novartis investigation was a conspiracy.

Day by day it becomes increasingly obvious that the Greek Novartis scandal is just what it is in other countries – a medical and not a political scandal. The company itself has admitted the medical scandal.

The government is trying to keep the case in the news as a scandal even though it appears to be the biggest case of scandal-mongering of the last years.

This situation allows the government and media which have been assigned the role of publishing leaks to continue their scandal-mongering and political exploitation of a judicial case.

The probe is continuing in the cases of Samaras, Stournaras, Avramopoulos, Georgiadis, and Salmas, and sources say most if not all of those files will be closed by the end of April, due to lack of evidence.

Mitsotakis said Alexis Tsipras and SYRIZA will destroy the country if they complete their term in office.

He dismissed as false the assertions of an attorney for witnesses who have entered the US witness protection programme that he had named politicians in Greece.