Judges react to court criticism

The Supreme Court yesterday invited the man responsible for identifying and rooting out corruption in the public sector to appear before Greece’s top judge to clarify recent statements he made to a parliamentary committee about the judiciary’s failure to hear some cases and to issue «questionable» verdicts in some trials that do take place. Supreme Court deputy prosecutor Roussos Papadakis asked Public Administration General Inspector Leandros Rakintzis to produce evidence next week to back up the claims he made. Rakintzis, who was a judge for 38 years, accused the judicial system of giving «preferential treatment» to the wealthy and famous and of delivering some judgments that were «inexplicable.» It appears that Rakintzis’s primary source of frustration with the judiciary is that over the last six years he has referred cases involving more than 450 allegedly corrupt civil servants to justice but no final verdicts have yet been issued for any of them.