New details in Bourboulia probe
New details regarding alleged improprieties committed by magistrate Constantina Bourboulia, who was in charge of investigating allegations of wrongdoings on the Athens Stock Exchange, emerged yesterday with the publication of the Supreme Court prosecutor’s disciplinary charges. Kathimerini, which on May 24 revealed that Bourboulia was the subject of a probe, yesterday published the charges by Evangelos Kroustallakis, who was Greece’s top prosecutor until his retirement at the beginning of July. It was not clear when the charges were filed. Last March, Bourboulia said she was resigning for health reasons. In the published charges, Kroustallakis calls for Bourboulias’s ejection from the judiciary for her alleged actions. «They comprise especially serious cases of disciplinary wrongdoing,» he wrote. It had been reported that Bourboulia was under investigation for having an affair with lawyer Stavros Koumentakis who represented some of the accused in the stock bubble investigation. It now emerges that she is also accused of having had close family ties with another lawyer of one of the accused and that she allowed the lawyer’s assistant to be in her office during testimony by the accused, Panayiotis Kontalexis. Despite these relationships, she did not tell her superiors of her conflict of interest, the prosecutor wrote. Bourboulia also appears to have been blackmailed by a rival of some of the accused, Costas Avramidis, who knew of the conflict of interest. She tried to get the two sides to reach an agreement and also allegedly had several meetings and phonecalls with Kontalexis outside her office. Also, Bourboulia bought a house worth at least 557,378.24 euros, explaining the source of only 157,000 euros from the sale of property, savings and a loan, the charges said.
