The publisher of an Athens daily, an editor and a political reporter were freed from custody on Sunday morning after spending the night at a police precinct following a lawsuit by Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos over a front-page article that criticized him over alleged mismanagement of European funds to deal with the refugee crisis.
The incident is the latest chapter in an ongoing feud between the poll-trailing leftist-rightist coalition and media outlets increasingly critical of the government and its Cabinet ministers.
A prosecutor, as per the legal framework in Greece, ordered a preliminary investigation into whether they trio libeled Kammenos, the head of a small, rightwing-populist party that props up the mostly leftist Tsipras government since January 2015. The prosecutor, as expected, also ordered the three, publisher Thanasis Mavridis, and the two journalists, Panagiotis Lampsas and Katerina Galanou, released. More journalists working for the same paper were named in the lawsuit but were not arrested, as police could not locate them.
The criminal libel lawsuit and the “in flagrante delicto” process that it entails, whereby an arrest warrant is immediately issued, alleged perpetrators arrested – if located within 48 hours – and a court trial conducted, has been sharply criticized for decades as threatening press freedom in the country.
However, Greek ministers and MPs who enjoy immunity from such legal challenges while serving in Parliament, such as the combative and controversial Kammenos, have very rarely used this legal route, preferring to press misdeameanor slander charges head in a civil law case.
The front-page article and headline that earned Kammenos’ ire appeared in the “Filelefthoros” (Greek for “Liberal”) newspaper, entitled “A Corrupt Party: Hundreds of millions (of euros) wasted; the feasting on funds by ‘our lads’,” which criticizes the minister and the defense ministry for allegedly squandering EU aid sent to Greece to deal with the refugee/migrant crisis. The latter enveloped the country – and Europe, subsequently – in 2015, erupting a few weeks after the Tsipras government was sworn-in.
As expected, reactions by practically all political parties and press organizations was sharp and immediate.
“Freedom of the press has defeated vileness. This isn’t a trial against Fileleftheros, nor its journalists, it’s a victory for democracy, which the current executive power is trying to muzzle,” Lampsas said, in exiting the police precinct in the Exarchia district.
In offering a defense of his unprecedented action, Kammenos took to his Twitter account on Saturday evening, where he posted the following:
“Because I see sensitivity by ND and Vaxevanis over the arrest of their libelous friends, I would like to inform them that before Lampsas was recruited by Marinakis, he (former) had his son in my office (in the defense ministry), at the (Greek) Pentagon, and he (the son) knew very well that I had no responsibility over the refugee crisis or EU funds,”
In his Tweet, Kammenos managed to include the main opposition New Democracy (ND) party, from which he was expelled in 2012 for opposing the country’s bailouts at the time, the publisher of a pro-government weekly, Costas Vaxevanis, Lampsas, the latter’s son, as well as shipowner and Olympiacos FC owner Vangelis Marinakis, who now controls a majority stake of the DOL media group.
The ruling SYRIZA party last month ordered ministers, deputies and cadres to stop appearing on television and radio programs by Athens broadcaster Skai, with the “last straw” being a report by a journalist and pundit claiming that the police and fire brigade chiefs would be cashiered in the wake of the deadly Mati wildfire. The statement by Takis Hatzis, who cited anonymous sources within the government was at first first vilified, although the two chiefs were subsequently replaced two weeks later.
In another similar press “embargo” of late, ND ordered its cadres to refrain from appearing on the state-run broadcaster’s (ERT) programs, after a panelist on an afternoon news affairs program said ND president Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ address in Thessaloniki last week reminded him of positions expressed by an inter-war Italian fascist theorist.
