Politicians said to be on so-called Lagarde list

Politicians said to be on so-called Lagarde list

 
A day after Supreme Court deputy prosecutor Nikos Pantelis asked for Parliament to be briefed regarding any politicians on the so-called “Lagarde list” -– a list of some 2,000 Greeks with Swiss bank accounts given to Greece by French authorities in 2010 to be probed for tax evasion -– a magazine published what it said was the original version of the list.

Greek authorities did not confirm that the list printed on Saturday in Hot Doc, a weekly magazine published by investigative journalist Costas Vaxevanis, was indeed the list of names given to former Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou by Christine Lagarde in the fall of 2010 when she was France’s finance minister.

Neither Papaconstantinou nor his successor Evangelos Venizelos, who forwarded the list to authorities earlier this month, have indicated that the list included the names of politicians.

But the Hot Doc list of 2,059 names includes at least three politicians, including two conservative former ministers, one of whom is deceased, and a current adviser to Prime Minister Antonis Samaras.

Former minister Giorgos Voulgarakis dismissed his inclusion on the list as “disinformation” and “mudslinging” and declared via his Twitter account, “Neither my wife nor I have any offshore companies or foreign bank accounts.”

ekathimerini.com , Saturday October 27, 2012 (17:57)