Former minister and wife sentenced to four years over false revenue claim
Former Defense Minister Yiannos Papantoniou and his wife, Stavroula Kourakou, were on Tuesday sentenced to four years in prison by an Athens misdemeanors court which found the pair guilty of making a false derivation of wealth (pothen esches) claim.
The court ruled that Papantoniou and Kourakou can buy off their respective sentences at a rate of 10 euros a day and said that the sentence is suspended until their case is heard by a second-instance court.
The former minister and his spouse were found to have made a false claim in their 2009 declaration of wealth forms, a procedure all Greek public officials are obliged to submit to once a year as part of the effort to clamp down on graft.
The discrepancy between their stated and actual assets was revealed when their names appeared on the so-called Lagarde list of Greeks with large deposits at the Geneva branch of HSBC.
The couple is also facing criminal charges in relation to the same case.
