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The former head of arms procurements at the Defense Ministry, Yiannis Sbokos, was expected to appear before an investigating magistrate on Wednesday in relation to his involvement in a large-scale corruption racket, following his arrest late on Tuesday. Sbokos was arrested in his office in central Athens, where police also seized a computer, while a search was also conducted at his residence in the northern suburb of Kifissia. Sbokos, a close aide of former PASOK defense minister Akis Tsochatzopoulos and former PASOK deputy, is an alleged member of a group linked to kickbacks and money laundering amounting to some 80 million euros from arms sales. According to testimony by Nikos Zigras, a cousin of Tsochatzopoulos’s and codefendant in the corruption case, Sbokos was allegedly a key figure in an intricate scheme developed to manage the former minister’s illegal properties. Sbokos allegedly received the kickbacks from the arms deals and subsequently invested the money in a listed company onwed by his father-in-law. Besides Zigras’s testimony, further evidence of Sbokos’s alleged involvement in the case was detected in various notes seized at Tsochatzopoulos’s office, in which the latter demanded money from his aide. | 
