Papaconstantinou had a little list THE first culprit of Greece’s biggest tax-evasion scandal in recent memory may not be a high-rolling tycoon but the former finance minister. In 2010 George Papaconstantinou, the chief negotiator of Greece’s first bail-out by the European Union and the IMF, took delivery from the French government of a computer disk with the names of some 2,000 Greeks with Swiss bank accounts. Mr Papaconstantinou should immediately have passed the “Lagarde list”, named after the then-French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, to the financial police.Instead he kept it, according to a leaked proposal for a parliamentary inquiry. It says there are “indications” that Mr Papaconstantinou deleted the names of three members of his family before transferring the list to a USB memory stick. The planned investigation was dropped; two directors of SDOE, the financial police, said they never received formal instructions from Mr Papaconstantinou.Mr Papaconstantinou now faces a full-blown parliamentary investigation, the lifting of his immunity from prosecution as an ex-minister and trial by a special court on charges of...
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