All four defendants in the phone tapping scandal with the Predator spyware in 2022 were found guilty by the Single-Member Misdemeanor Court of Athens on Thursday.
The defendants, all businessmen, two Israelis and two Greeks, are linked to sanctioned spyware maker Intellexa and were found guilty of violating the confidentiality of telephone communications in a major case involving the illegal wiretapping of ministers and other politicians, among them leader of PASOK Nikos Androulakis, journalists, business leaders, senior military officials and judicial officers.
The scandal triggered the resignation of the EYP head and a senior aide to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, who happened to be his nephew.
116 victims of the wiretapping scandal that was revealed in 2022 brought the case to court.
The scandal triggered the resignation of the EYP head and a senior aide to Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis
The verdict
The defendants are the Intellexa founder Tal Dilian, his business partner Sara Aleksandra Fayssal Hamou, Felix Bitzios, former deputy administrator and shareholder of Intellexa, and Yiannis Lavranos, whose company, Krikel, purchased Predator, media reported. The defendants denied involvement in illegal conduct.
Announcing the verdict, the presiding judge said that the four defendants were guilty of the misdemeanors of interfering with a personal data archiving system, jointly, consecutively, committed and attempted, of violating the confidentiality of telephone communication and oral conversation, jointly, consecutively, committed and attempted, and of illegally accessing an information system or data, jointly, consecutively, committed and attempted.
“From the consideration of all acceptable means, mainly witness testimonies but also documents that shed light on the truth, it was proven that the accused, after a joint decision, together with other associates, committed the acts with common intent. They gained access to personal data, personal conversations,” the court president announced.
“In this case, for the first two acts, for the individual acts, a more correct characterization must be attributed from consecutive to serial crimes,” the court president said, adding that there is no question of apparent confluence.
The four defendants were found guilty of 5 completed acts and 82 attempts.
The president also ruled that three acts that were introduced as attempts to interfere with the system should be considered completed because the three individuals stepped on the infected links, as was proven in the audience.
The court rejected any mitigating circumstances to the four defendants, and imposed a combined prison sentence of 126 years and 8 months, eight of which will have to be served. The sentence was suspended pending appeal.
PASOK leader Nikos Androulakis
Main opposition leader of socialist PASOK-Movement for Change, Nikos Androulakis, said after the court decision that he felt vindicated by the Court’s decision to convict those involved in the wiretapping case. A
t the same time, he described the ruling as a “ major defeat for the deep state organized by the Maximos Mansion system and the prime minister.”
At the time he was wiretapped, Andoulakis was an elected member of the European Parliament and it was clear that he would be elected to be leader of PASOK in the few months to follow..
