"Sue Venizelos now!" by Kostas Vaxevanis

By Kostas Vaxevanis

Re-posted and translated from Pandora's Box by @IrateGreek

Is there a prosecutor to do the obvious? Yes, I know, this sentence has been written and said thousands of times before, but I don't know what else I can write anymore. The Parliamentary Committee investigating the issue of the Lagarde list [1] has now officially received from the French authorities documents describing how the list arrived in Greece. This fully confirms HotDoc's findings: we wrote that the list arrived through official channels from France, together with official handover and delivery notes, in order for it to be used by the tax department. Everything we uncovered as journalists with information provided the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Greek Embassy in Paris has now been forwarded, officially, to Parliament.

HotDoc Magazine Issue #26 - Maria, the banks and guns-for-hire: the contract on Vaxevanis

The following is a summary of pages 14-41 of the 26th issue of the magazine HotDoc, whose editor is journalist Kostas Vaxevanis. 


The 3rd issue of the magazine HotDoc, dated 24 May 2012, revealed sensitive information about scandals involving Greek banks. Advance copies had been sent to other news outlets. On 23 May, Fimotro, a blog often denounced for engaging in defamation and blackmail, published a picture of a receipt allegedly issued by the Greek Intelligence Service (EYP) in the name of HotDoc’s editor, Kostas Vaxevanis. The receipt was dated 15 June 2011 and said he was paid €50,000 for services to EYP for the 1st semester of 2011. Fimotro, as well as other blogs which circulated this picture of the receipt, also played a role in portraying Reuters’ Steven Grey, who was researching a similar story on Greek banks, as an “agent” of unknown forces who sought to ruin the Greek economy (Reuters published at the time a long piece on the surveillance Grey was subjected to).

The HotDoc team denounced the receipt as a forgery and Vaxevanis tried to sue Giannis Papagiannis, the administrator of Fimotro, whose name is known to the public following a previous court case in which he was accused of blackmail. Strangely, the prosecutor office refused the documents of the previous case file as proof of his identity, and, because Papagiannis could not be charged with a felony in the HotDoc case, Google refused to provide his personal data. The case against Papagiannis was thus dropped, despite abundant online evidence of his identity, including, recently, blog posts signed with his full name.

#rbnews international show - 27 October 2012

Our guest on the #rbnews international weekly show today was Aris Chatzistefanou (@xstefanou), of Debtocracy and Catastroika fame. We discussed Golden Dawn, its links with the Greek police force, the many failures of Greek media to handle these issues and the publication of the Lagarde list" in Hot Doc magazine. The weekly news section is a little longer than usual, as there were many things to report this week.
You can listen to the podcast after the jump.