Forty-eight main opposition New Democracy (ND) deputies on Wednesday tabled a Parliament question to a handful of ministers alleging “preferential lending” towards the local Kalogritsas construction group by non-systemic Attica Bank.
The same business group, controlled by the same-name family, had been one of the four winners in a controversial television license tender last year, which was subsequently and unceremoniously nullified by a ruling issued by a Council of State majority of justices.
ND’s deputies referred to lawsuit filed with the relevant supreme court prosecutor by the Bank of Greece (BoG), following a joint audit of Attica Bank by the former with the European Central Bank’s Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM).
The audit purportedly shows a systematic pattern of lending at below market rates and often with zero or partial guarantees, the issuance of long-term bond loans to service short-term lending allocated as start-up capital and even charges of cronyism, whereby “friendly” businesses would participate in the non-systemic bank’s share capital increase.
The table question notes that since 2015, when leftist SYRIZA assumed power, the Kalogritsas group’s affiliated Toxotis S.A. construction firm received no less than 39 loans from Attica Bank.
Press reports last month alleged that a well-defined highway construction project in western Greece on the current Patras-Pyrgos roadway was broken up into four separate tenders in order to allow Toxotis to bid, given that its contractor’s license was not high enough to bid for the entire project as a whole.
Ioannis Vladimiros Kalogritsas has previously submitted a winning bid for a nationwide television license that included funding attained via another Attica Bank loan, which was secured with pasture land located on a slope of the arid Ionian island of Ithaca — land, in fact, that was granted to him by a family friend.
Besides the construction sector, Kalogritsas also appeared, until Wednesday, in fact, as the main financial backer of a new pro-government Athens weekly.
