The use of Lagarde’s list is within the law

A member of the economic team of the Greek government told protothema.gr exclusively that "the ministry of Finance will request a second copy of Lagarde's list to compare it with the first that we have in our hands."

Obviously, with this decision the government is sending a message to the former minister that it does not trust him on which names he received and which he handed over since he had the list in his office for over 6 months without anyone knowing whether it was being used or not.

Also, Yannis Stournaras’ decision to request a copy clearly puts former Finance ministers in a tight spot and especially Yorgos Papakonstantinou, who received the list in early 2011, selectively gave some names for an audit but never really clarified whether they were checked or not.

Meanwhile, over ten SDOE members will begin an attempt this morning to trace the mysteries of the famous Lagarde list even with almost a two-year delay and the hiding of the list by former minister Papakonstantinou.

"We want to catch some people for tax evasion. We are not interested in putting someone in prison. Let them pay what they must and let them go home," members of the organization said.

SDOE must now check the names of 1991 and crosscheck their deposits with their tax returns. It is a job that will not take more than twenty days. Certainly it is likely that these accounts are now either closed or empty. One easily understands that valuable time of at least twenty months was lost. If the checks were done then, the Greek government would have received a lot of money from taxes today, attest Finance ministry sources.

Also, two questions that arise are: 1) why did Papakonstantinou receive and deliver Lagarde’s list informally and 2) why did he not inform the SDOE chief when he handed the list whether it can be used or not? What happened to the data he kept from a "useless" list?

According to information, the list informally kept changing hands for almost a year and a half. According to former Finance ministry members, the entire list was handed to Papakonstantinou by former French Finance minister Christine Lagarde and without protocol being followed, Papakonstantinou gave it informally to Diotis who also unofficially gave it to Venizelos. Following reports that the list was lost, today Venizelos sent an official list to Maximos Mansion with the names he received from Diotis.

Thus, it is striking how the list was circulated from hand to hand and made useless, as Diotis told Venizelos when the latter took office as Finance minister.

Diotis then claimed that he could not use the list, since Switzerland condemns any country that uses data from there, when these are products of interception. Due to its informal passing from one hand to another, he argued that it is impossible to know the source and decided not to proceed with further checks to avoid a reaction from Switzerland. Therefore the list could not be used.

SDOE has information that the initial list contains the names and amounts of deposits, making it imminently exploitable. This disproves Papakonstantinou’s statement that most of the names did not include a specific amount. Moreover, it was said that some other names had maritime deposits next to them and these are also not taxed in Greece, so there was no apparent reason for a check.

The conclusion of those who dealt with the case is that the list Papakonstantinou delivered to Diotis had zero usefulness, while questions still remain about the withheld information and the reasons that led him to make such a decision.

Papakonstantinou must now explain why he chose to isolate specific elements of the official list he received from the French side and did not tell his successor in the ministry of Finance and SDOE that the Greek government had obtained the official list and not "some electronic information."