Pages

Friday, June 6, 2014

SDOE Investigating 500 Cases from ‘Lagarde list’

The Financial and Economic Crime Unit (SDOE) of Greece has already conducted 500 inspections of cases in the notorious “Lagarde list.” As reported violations were discovered in all 500 cases. The SDOE director Theodoros Floratos reported that so far about 25% of the 2,062 cases contained in the list have been investigated while he stated that he would submit a final report to the financial prosecutor as soon as the audits finish.  Floratos noted that in only 918 of the cases do the bank accounts of individuals and legal entities appear to contain funds, while in the rest of the cases the bank accounts appear empty. He revealed a case of a dentist based in Voula, southern Athens who appears to have evaded taxes amounting to 13 million euros and said that the dentist appeared to have an empty bank account in the Lagarde list. Apart from the Lagarde list, Floratos pointed out that SDOE’s 2 central and 13 regional agencies are inspecting Greek accounts in Luxembourg and Lichtenstein and are conducting an estimated 20,000 simultaneous audits. The Lagarde list contains roughly 2,062 names of Greeks with undeclared accounts at Swiss HCBC bank’s Geneva branch. It was named after the former French finance minister Christine Lagarde, who in October 2010 gave the list to Greek officials to help them  deal with tax evasion. However, it was only two years later the list became known to the wider public, when Greek journalist  Kostas Vaxevanis published it in his magazine  protesting against the Greek government’s inactivity.

READ THE ORIGINAL POST AT greece.greekreporter.com