An Athens appellate court on Friday cut a previous eight-year prison term, handed down to a former minister who received a sizeable lump sum from German multinational Siemens almost 20 years ago, to five years.
Moreover, the five-justice appeals court (by a four-to-one vote) also essentially transformed the now five-year term into a suspended sentence, allowing one-time transport minister and PASOK deputy Tassos Mantelis to buy out his sentence for 40 euros per day.
Mantelis was convicted in the first instance on one count of felony money laundering, with the court convinced that he received the equivalent of 230,000 euros – paid at the time in deutschmarks – as a bribe that he subsequently attempted to legalized.
The overall fine and redeemable sentence reaches 140,000 euros, which was broken down by the court into 32 monthly installments, as per a request by Mantelis.
An indictment against Mantelis charged that he received 450,000 deutschmarks in order to pick Siemens’ bid for a contract to digitalize land lines then operated by the state-owned telephony monopoly, OTE.
The money was transferred to a Swiss bank account, belonging to an in-law of the former minister, code-named “A. Rokos”, in two installments.
A former Siemens Hellas executive, Ilias Georgiou, had his 12-year prison sentence reduced by a year in the appeals process. Nevertheless, the 80-year-old defendant is expected to land in prison.
