Wiretaps: Lavranos, Bitzios, Hamou and Dilian found guilty

The four defendants in the case concerning wiretaps carried out through the illegal Predator spyware were convicted by the court.

Presiding judge Nikos Aksianakis announced the ruling as follows: “After evaluating all the evidence, mainly witness testimonies presented during the hearing and the documents in the case file, it was proven that the defendants jointly and in complicity committed the criminal acts attributed to them, always with common intent. They intervened in telephone systems, created archives and obtained information by gaining knowledge of telephone conversations and accessing personal data.”

Specifically, Dilian, Hamou, Bitzios and Lavranos were found guilty—following a permissible reclassification of the charges—of:

• Unlawful interference with a personal data filing system, jointly and repeatedly, completed in relation to five victims and attempted in relation to 82 victims; and
• Violation of the confidentiality of telephone communications and oral conversations, jointly and repeatedly, both completed and attempted, as well as illegal access to an information system or data, jointly and continuously, both completed and attempted.

At the same time, the defendants were acquitted of certain individual acts.

Regarding the offense of illegal access to an information system or data, jointly and continuously, completed and attempted, criminal prosecution was terminated for 108 victims. However, the defendants were found guilty in relation to five victims, including Nikos Androulakis and journalist Thanasis Koukakis.

“For the first two offenses, the individual acts must more correctly be characterized as separate (multiple) crimes rather than a continuing offense,” the court president stated, adding that there was no issue of apparent concurrence of offenses. “Out of 116 victims, the truly concurrent crimes coincide in 87 cases,” he noted, explaining that for the remaining cases the classification of a continuing offense remains.

Sentences Imposed

The court imposed on each defendant a total sentence of 126 years and 8 months in prison (following aggregation), with 8 years to be actually served.

Although the court ordered full enforcement of the sentence for each defendant, it granted suspension of execution pending appeal.

The severity of the sentences is linked to the court’s decision that each act was committed as a separate offense rather than as a continuing crime. Accepting the prosecutor’s proposal that each dispatch of an infected message constituted a distinct violation of a protected legal interest resulted in a significantly higher sentence.

At the same time, despite requests from the defendants, the court did not recognize any mitigating circumstances for any of them.