Family of former Cypriot minister jailed in Greece unable to raise bail
Xinhua, June 5, 2015 Adjust font size:
The family of a former Cypriot minister jailed in Greece for alleged money laundering said on Thursday it was unable to raise the bail set by an Athens court to get him out of jail.
In a 3-2 majority vote, the court in Athens accepted on Wednesday a petition by ex-minister Dinos Michaelides, 80, to be released on health grounds, but it ordered him to pay a bail of 700,000 euros (789,000 U.S. dollars) and also not to travel outside of Greece.
"The bail is too high for us, we do not have the means of paying it. We cannot raise that amount of money," a family member told Xinhua via telephone from the port city of Limassol, on condition of anonymity.
He said Michaelides' lawyers in Athens were mulling over whether to make a new petition for the court to lower the amount of the bail.
Michaelides and his son Michalis were extradited by Cyprus to Greece in 2013.
They were both given a 15-year jail sentence after a court found them guilty of helping former Greek defense minister and a strongman of Greece's Socialist PASOK party Akis Tsohatzopoulos launder billions of euros he got as kickback money from a Syrian arms dealer.
The senior Michaelides, a former Cypriot interior minister in the late 1990's, and his 28-year-old son were alleged to have transferred millions of euros from their bank accounts to Tsohatzopoulos.
The money had been paid by Syrian-born businessman Foud al-Zayad, who at the time kept a residence in Cyprus and acted as a middleman for the purchase of the Russian Thor M1 anti-aircraft system.
The anti-aircraft missile system had been purchased by Greece and was given to Cyprus in exchange for a much more powerful anti-aircraft system, the S-300, originally acquired by Cyprus.
Tsohatzopoulos, who served as Greece's defense minister from 1996 to 2001, was jailed for 20 years in 2013 for taking bribes for the Thor M1 deal and for tax fraud.
Al-Zayed, who has never been caught, was tried in absentia in Athens and was given a life sentence for bribery and a 17-year prison term for money laundering. Endit