“Much ado about nothing” was the final result of a nearly decade-old political and judicial furor surrounding a controversial land swap between the Greek state and a Mount Athos monastery, the Vatopedi case, named after the monastery.
All 14 defendants in the case, including the abbot of Vatopedi, Efraim, other monks, notaries and attorneys involved in the land-for-lakeside properties contracts, as well as former directors of state-run real estate holdings companies, a former agriculture ministry general secretary and others were acquitted by a three-justice appellate court in Athens.
The court ruled that charges of felony breach of faith and falsifying affirmations, among others, were not proven in the case, which essentially involved the monastery exchanging titles it held for a lake in northeastern Greece (Vistonida) and the land around the lake for choice tracts of land held by the state.
The case generated a massive political furor in pre-crisis 2008 Greece, a controversy that distinctly dented the image and the popularity of the then center-right Karamanlis government.
“Today’s decision by Greek justice reveals the magnitude of the wretchedness of the Vatopedi case; it reveals the machinations emanating from suspicious and mean interests … to stage this plot,” former prime minister Costas Karamanlis said, in a written statement.
