Maria Maraggelis and Filistoras Destebasidis, both former protected witnesses in the Novartis case, were found guilty today by the Three-Member Misdemeanor Court of Athens (second instance).

Specifically, the court unanimously found Filistoras Destebasidis guilty, as it had at first instance as well, of the offenses of repeated false testimony and false accusation against Adonis Georgiadis, Andreas Loverdos, and Nikos Maniadakis.

Maria Maraggelis was also unanimously found guilty of offenses of false accusation against Adonis Georgiadis, Andreas Loverdos, Ioannis Stournaras, and Antonis Samaras. By contrast, the court decided to discontinue the criminal prosecution against the defendant for certain offenses of false accusation against Andreas Loverdos and Marios Salmas. The court recognized for both defendants the mitigating circumstance of a lawful life, and the court’s decision is awaited regarding one additional mitigating circumstance and subsequently the sentences.

The conviction of “Aikaterini Keleki” and “Maximos Sarafis,” which were the code names of the two defendants when they testified before the anti-corruption prosecutors as protected witnesses, definitively overturns the narrative of bribery of ten political figures by the pharmaceutical company, as Maraggelis and Destebasidis had initially claimed in their testimonies in 2017 and 2018, at a time when they ignited the country’s political scene.

It is recalled that the first-instance court had imposed last September a total prison sentence of 25 months on Filistoras Destebasidis and a total prison sentence of 33 months on Maria Maraggelis, suspended for three years.

Today’s court decision was preceded by the recommendation of the prosecutor of the bench, who had requested the conviction of the two defendants for the offenses of false testimony and false accusation, even leaving pointed remarks regarding the anti-corruption prosecutors who had handled the relevant case file. “No evidence whatsoever emerges concerning the bribery of any political figure,” the prosecutor emphasized in her statement at trial, making specific reference to what Maria Maraggelis had claimed in her defense about her “award” in the United States after testimony she had given there in the pharmaceutical company case.

“The defendant said that in the U.S. she was deemed credible, here not. Let me say that procedures in the U.S. and Greece are different. American law provides for a settlement for corporate giants, and there is no corresponding procedure here,” the prosecutor noted, and at another point in her address she stressed: “All this should have been studied by the defendants themselves before they testified. It is self-evident that what they said could lead to prosecutions against political figures. One cannot go lightly and give such testimony and say ‘I testified to what I saw’; no, you testified to what you inferred.”

It should be noted that during her testimony before the court, Maria Maraggelis spoke for the first time about an “award” from the American authorities, before whom, as she admitted, she testified in the Novartis case. The former protected witness maintained that everything she testified to before the anti-corruption prosecutors were things she experienced and saw as secretary to the once-powerful man of Novartis in Greece, Konstantinos Frouzis. “I testified about the company’s unfair practices; I had no specific intent or malice toward these persons (i.e. the political figures). I did not know how the case would develop afterward,” the defendant said, while maintaining, however, that she testified before the American authorities a long time after her testimonies in Greece.

For his part, Filistoras Destebasidis characterized in his own defense as “narrative” the testimonies he gave in 2018 to the anti-corruption prosecutors, targeting specific political figures as recipients of bribes from Novartis. The defendant also repeatedly stressed that the source of his knowledge for what he had claimed before the anti-corruption prosecutors regarding political figures was K. Frouzis. He further maintained that he decided to testify out of “moral motivation” and because the prosecutors investigating the case seemed to him to be “well-intentioned.” However, during the trial, this defendant never wished to answer questions from trial participants as to whether he testified in the U.S. and whether he received compensation from the American authorities. Finally, Destebasidis, who had been an executive at Novartis, described his former employer as “the OPEKEPE of medicine,” arguing that pharmaceutical companies are not “churches but corruption mills.”

In a statement after the conclusion of the trial, the lawyer of Adonis Georgiadis, Michalis Dimitrakopoulos, said: “The two defendants were finally convicted for having testified and filed false accusations against Mr. Adonis Georgiadis. It was a vulgar lie that Mr. Georgiadis was allegedly bribed.

The former anti-corruption prosecutor Ms. Eleni Touloupaki characterized the two convicted individuals as public-interest witnesses, and thus, having criminal immunity, they defamed ten distinguished politicians. Fortunately, the criminalization of political life failed.”