Tsekou to face more questions

The woman with whom former Culture Ministry general secretary Christos Zachopoulos is alleged to have had an affair has been asked to return to court for questioning on Monday. Magistrate Dimitris Economou will question Zachopoulos’s former assistant, Evi Tsekou, for a second time on Monday as he prepares to charge other people involved in the case with trying to blackmail the former public official. So far, Tsekou is the only person to have been remanded in custody for allegedly filming herself having sex with Zachopoulos and then using the footage to put pressure on him. Tsekou is also alleged to have tried to persuade journalists to pay her for the material. The lawyer who accompanied her to these meetings, Christos Nikoloutsopoulos, is due to appear before the magistrate tomorrow. He is considered a key player in the affair and could face charges of blackmail himself if there is enough evidence to support claims that he asked Mega TV and the Proto Thema newspaper for money on Tsekou’s behalf. Meanwhile, the head of the financial crimes squad, Spyros Kladas, who has been implicated in an offshoot of the Zachopoulos case, yesterday hit out at journalist Makis Triantafyllopoulos. The TV presenter aired, on his show on Monday night, a conversation he had with MP Costas Koukodimos that seemed to confirm earlier claims that the deputy approached him to ask him for a favor on Kladas’s behalf. Triantafyllopoulos also claimed that in 2000 Kladas had acted as a lawyer for the parents of a sick child, collecting money to take the boy to the USA for an operation. The journalist alleged that Kladas did not help the family and instead appeared as a witness for the National Bank of Greece, which seized the money they had collected over a legal technicality. Kladas said he provided free advice to the family and did not appear in court to support the bank’s case.