Former minister accused of threatening prosecutor

In testimony on Thursday to a parliamentary committee probing possible political interference in the Novartis investigation, former appeals court prosecutor Georgia Tsatani allegedly accused former alternate justice Minister Dimitris Papangelopoulos of trying to interfere in her work and using threatening language.

According to sources, Tsatani referred to a bomb attack on her home in October 2016 that was claimed by guerrilla group Conspiracy of the Cells of Fire.

Several of the references to her in the proclamation issued by the group after the attack resembled language used by Papangelopoulos in his attempted interventions, she allegedly claimed.

Commenting, Papangelopoulos accused Tsatani of lying, claiming that she was “known for the biased exercising of her duties in other serious cases too,” and noting that she was “the mother of cadres and would-be MPs of New Democracy.”

In his own defense, he claimed that, as a minister, he had been an “uncompromising persecutor of corruption.”