#giorgos malamas

[mariacallous]

Alleged ties between Greek police and organised crime were put again under a spotlight on Monday when media claimed to have obtained a secret internal police report titled “The eternal entanglement of police officers with corruption circles”.

Yiannis Souliotis, on Kathimerini newspaper, reported that the leak of the document and its dissemination to a small number of recipients was not just by chance. It reported that the report has been shared also with some politicians as well as journalists.

The recent reassignment of officers serving in sensitive positions has been cited as one reason for the document’s leak.

BIRN has obtained part of the report, which describes conversations on WhatsApp between a senior police officer and another police officer, Spyros Papachristou, who was murdered in spring 2018. The first officer appears willing to satisfy Papachristou’s requests for paid escorts for businessmen and other “errands.”

Kathimerini reported that Papachristou had good communications with the former Alternate Minister of Public Order and Citizens Protection, Nikos Toskas, and at the same time, family and social relations with powerful businessmen, members of the then leftist SYRIZA-ANEL government, and the Church.

Concerning Papachristou’s murder, media reported that pressure had been exerted not to declassify his mobile phones owing to concern that his contacts with government officials of that period, high-ranking police officers and the underworld would be revealed.

Things took a different turn in 2021 after the murder of the journalist Giorgos Karaivaz who had been in contact with both Papachristou and Dimitris Malamas and Dimitris Kapetanakis. All four of them, all mentioned in a National Intelligence Service NIS report, were murdered – the first in 2019 and the latter in 2020.

Malamas was known to the police and had been accused of blackmail. Kapetanakis was known for robberies, blackmails and involvement in the case of the “Crime Syndicate,”; a criminal organization that operated in Greece from the late-1980s until the mid-1990s.

A 2015-2017 NIS’s investigation into telephone and physical surveillance brought to light evidence of the involvement of current and former police officers, lawyers, and other persons with the so-called “Greek mafia.” Nineteen people mentioned in NIS’s report were referred to trial.

But on January 31, a court declared the defendants innocent due to lack of evidence. Only handwritten notes had been sent to the court, as the transcript of NIS’s telephone monitoring had not been sent to the court.

Some officials dispute the newly leaked document, reported Kathimerini. They say that the conversations were “stitched” to create impressions designed to target specific people.

[adoniseverywheremen]

Giorgos Malamas for Greeks Come True by Yiorgos Kaplanidis