New arrest over defense contracts
An ex-Defense Ministry official was arrested in Athens on Friday on suspicion of having accepted bribes as part of arms procurement contracts signed more than a decade ago.
Antonis Kantas was deputy head of procurements at the ministry between 1996 and 2002, when the jailed Akis Tsochatzopoulos and then Yiannos Papantoniou served as ministers.
Greece’s anti-money laundering agency allegedly found that 13.7 million dollars in a Singapore bank account belonged to offshore firms linked to Kantas.
Kantas was first arrested in September for allegedly accepting 500,000 euros from German electronics and engineering giant Siemens in connection with a Greek program for the modernization of the armed forces’ telecommunications system in 1999.
