eKathimerini — The Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the director of the Center for Disease Prevention and Control (KEELPNO) should face trial for fraud.
Thodoros Papadimitriou faces criminal charges connected to three cases of alleged financial mismanagement.
The first refers to a security contract for 2005-06, which is said to have led to losses of over 175,500 euros for the organization. The second concerns a retroactive pay hike for KEELPNO officials, which totaled 58,000 euros, while the third was a fee of 336,488 euros paid to a private company to investigate alleged bioterrorism.
Papadimitriou claims that in the first two instances his signature had been forged, while in the third he had paid the fee himself.
The charges against Mr Papadimitriou do not relate to earlier media accounts of KEELPNO’s mismanagement of public funds for public awareness campaigns. These referred to a report by public health service inspectors which claimed that some of the center’s state funding was mismanaged, with unjustifiable sums spent on media campaigns.
In a letter to the Health Ministry issued at the time the inspector’s findings were published, KEELPNO claimed the report contained “expedient, not legitimate criticism” and did not include the center’s own observations.
The inspector’s report, which was handed to prosecutors in early December, had found that 1.5 million euros spent by KEELPNO on campaigns from 2012 to 2014 comprised “social messages” that could have been aired for free. It also noted that some of the campaigns, for cancer and generic drugs, did not fall within KEELPNO’s remit.
KEELPNO countered that it has been the competent authority for public awareness on chronic diseases including cancer since 2005. As for the argument about free promotion, it said only very few campaigns are aired for free and that they tend to be given slots when viewing figures are low, such as very early in the morning, which limits the impact of the campaign.
Edited -YXamonakis
