Detailed accounts
A document presented to the German parliamentary committee that investigated the assets of the now-defunct East German security machinery, and which was signed by the international auditor Ernst & Young and Germany’s WTU company, reveals about 140 transfers in a bank account belonging to Greek tycoon Socrates Kokkalis. The withdrawals were carried out in the period 1985-1991 when Kokkalis’s Intracom telecommunications supplier was quickly becoming dominant in Greece. The account is one of those which opposition parties have said should be investigated by the judiciary. On Friday, Prime Minister Costas Simitis said that if the judiciary requested the help of the government it would have it. The document, which Kathimerini published yesterday, shows that huge amounts of money were transferred through the account belonging to Kokkalis at Handelsbank, with named and unnamed recipients hidden behind codes and secret accounts. A substantial amount of the money went to Bank Suisse in Geneva, with a certain Mr Skeparnias and an unnamed caretaker being the main recipients. The specific Handelsbank account was used to transfer $11 million and 1.7 million German marks. As the parliamentary report said in 1998, the above mentioned amounts were used «as a means to affect the domestic Greek market, in other words, to help conclude deals with the public sector, seeing as the German Democratic Republic’s outdated telecommunications equipment was not competitive in a Western country under conditions of an open market.» The movement of this and other accounts have not been investigated, with judicial probes ending even before they began, after the existence of the accounts became known.
