Did a former finance minister tamper with evidence to protect his family?

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 falsifying documents and failing to carry out his duties. He has been expelled from the PanHellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) and disowned by his ex-boss, George Papandreou, a former prime minister and ex-Pasok leader. He denies tampering with the computer disk, claiming he is being made a scapegoat for foot-dragging by others who failed to ensure the people on the list were investigated as possible tax evaders.

Evangelos Venizelos, the current leader of Pasok, who succeeded Mr Papaconstantinou as finance minister, should face a parliamentary inquiry too, according to Syriza, the main opposition party. Its lawmakers claim he kept the USB stick in his desk drawer for more than a year before sending it to Antonis Samaras, the prime minister, the day after Yannis Stournaras, the current finance minister, said he would clear things up by asking Paris for another copy of the disk.

The names on the USB stick, which were leaked to a Greek investigative magazine, read like a roll-call of Greece’s internationally educated business and professional elite. The new disk, now in the hands of a financial prosecutor, contains the names of Mr Papaconstantinou’s family: Eleni Papaconstantinou, a Harvard-trained corporate lawyer and adviser to TAIPED, the privatisation agency, and her husband, whose joint account reportedly held $1.2m, as well as Ms Papaconstantinou’s sister’s husband, a middleman handling weapons purchases for the navy. On January 2nd Ms Papaconstantinou, who maintains that she has done nothing illegal, resigned from her role at TAIPED.

Mr Samaras promised swift retribution for tax evaders in his new year’s message, insisting that nobody would be immune from prosecution. His compatriots are sceptical: according to a recent poll, two-thirds of Greeks say that the government is failing to go after tax cheats.