It was initially only a case, the wiretapping of two journalists, which the Greek government had tried to minimize in recent months. It is now a state scandal. On July 26, the leader of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok), Nikos Androulakis, in turn revealed that his phone had been targeted by the Predator spyware. As the days go by and revelations in the Greek investigative media – Inside StoryReporters United, the Editors’ Journal (Efsyn), and Solomon – the Mitsotakis government finds itself increasingly cornered. Friday August 5, the secretary general of the office of the prime minister who is also his nephew, Grigoris Dimitriadis, resigned, followed by Panagiotis Kontoleon, the director of the intelligence services (EYP).
Heard behind closed doors in Parliament on July 29, the latter admitted to having wiretapped two Greek investigative journalists. “Several deputies confirmed to me that I was watched by the Greek secret services during a report on a Syrian child locked up in a detention center on the island of Kos. The secret services cited national security reasons as justification following the tensions with Turkey in March 2020 and Ankara’s attempt to instrumentalize the migration issue to put pressure on Greece,” reports journalist Stavros Malichudis.
Media sued
Shortly after his election in 2019, Conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis placed the intelligence services directly under his aegis. Grigoris Dimitriadis also submitted his resignation after the publication ofa damning investigation of the investigative media Reporters United and Efsyn, which made the link between this close friend of Mitsotakis and Felix Bitzios, deputy director of Intellexa, the company which markets the Predator spyware in Greece.
According to the Prime Minister’s press office, his resignation is due “to the climate of toxicity that has developed around his person and his targeting by part of the media”. Grigoris Dimitriadis has also initiated a civil lawsuit against the media behind the revelations and even against Thanasis Koukakis, a journalist who had revealed several cases of corruption and who had been targeted by the Predator software. “I am attacked just because I shared articles regarding the case on Twitter. Four months after the confirmation of my monitoring by the spyware following the analyzes of the laboratory Citizen Lab of the university of Toronto, the government did not cease denying and minimizing the subject. This is worrying for the rule of law in Greece, and the European Union [UE] must take the situation seriously.” confides Thanasis Koukakis to the World.
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