Greece’s best-known criminal attorney, Alexis Kougias, has assumed the defense of former national theater director Dimitris Lignadis, who remains in custody after he was arrested over the weekend for alleged rapes and sexual assaults of teenage boys.
Kougias, a celebrity attorney and majority shareholder of a top-flight football team in Greece, first underlined that the presumption of innocence for his client has been violated, while also referring to prosecution witnesses as “professional homosexuals”.
In a subsequently circulated written statement, Kougias also directly attacked the preliminary indictment, which includes the under-investigation charges and served as the instrument for Lignadis’ arrest and pending appearance this week before an investigating magistrate.
“I was expecting that the contents of the indictment would have included the evidence to justify this criminal prosecution for the offense of serial rapes… as well as the issuance of an arrest warrant, a procedural act, which is foreseen in extreme cases, when prosecutors and jurists consider two conditions: the first being when a suspect is charged with illegal behavior that is currently ongoing, and secondly, when it is widely considered that he will disappear or flee overseas.”
