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42 Defendants Acquitted After ASE Scandal

ASEAll the defendants in the 13 year-old case of the Athens Stock Exchange share bubble were acquitted on grounds that fraud could not be established.
The three-member court of appeals acquitted the 42 defendants after an eight month procedure that begun on April 15th. The defendants who are mostly entrepreneurs, investors, brokers and ship owners were accused of heavy crimes such as fraud and money laundering.
The court’s decision held that the documents and the hearing procedure could not establish the charges of fraud, because they didn’t show that the selling price of the disputed block trades played a key role and ultimately affected their final price on the ASE dashboard for that specific period of time.
Thirteen years after the first prosecutions made by Dimitris Asprogerakas in 2000, following an investigation into shares manipulation in 1999, there was a hearing concerning the case.
The inquest was assigned at the time to former judicial officer Konstantina Bourboulia, who was subsequently charged and sentenced to 12 years in prison for official misconduct and money laundering relating to the handling of the case file concerning the shares of SIGALAS company.
An 836 page decree was issued, concerning the 42 defendants. It spoke of the artificial increase in the shares value and listed key findings of the Securities Exchange Commission and the Greek Financial and Economic Crime Unit (SDOE).
The decree also mentioned a similar prosecutor proposal concerning that time, when listed companies made false announcements of brokerage transactions with values different from those announced to investors thus creating “a misleading picture of the shares progress, their price and their marketability.”

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