By Michael Holden

A Maoist cult leader was found guilty on Friday of raping and beating his brainwashed female followers, while keeping his own daughter a fearful prisoner for more than 30 years in homes across south London.

Aravindan Balakrishnan, 75, known as Comrade Bala, used sexual degradation and physical and mental violence to keep the women under his control, turning his commune based on Communist teachings into his own personal cult with members who believed him to be a god, prosecutors said.

His own daughter, who was born to one of the women in the collective, was bullied and beaten. She was barely allowed to leave her home and never permitted to go to school, play with friends or even see a doctor, London’s Southwark Crown Court was told.

She was not told who her parents were, only learning the identity of her mother after her death when the girl was 14. Her family did not even know she existed.

When she escaped his clutches two years ago after a fellow member contacted a charity and police because she had become so unwell, she was aged 30, very ill with diabetes, and was diagnosed with chronic Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

She was unable to carry out ordinary day-to-day tasks or even cross a road on her own.

“There are no words to express the pain that Bala and the collective has caused me. I was bullied, tormented, humiliated, isolated and degraded,” his daughter, who is still recovering from her ordeal, said in a statement given to the court

“I lived in constant fear and was deprived of a normal life. I was a non person, no-one knew I existed.”

The court heard she wrote a daily diary which included the regular beatings. She was so lonely as a child she started to talk to the toilet and taps, prosecutors said.

MIND-CONTROL MACHINE

Balakrishnan, a small, grey-haired, bespectacled figure, denied all charges but was convicted of cruelty to a child and false imprisonment, as well as raping, indecently assaulting and causing actual bodily harm to two other women, now both aged 64.

He was the head of a Communist group in south London in the 1970s called the Workers’ Institute, a charismatic and energetic speaker who attracted followers with his plan for revolution and to overthrow what he saw as Britain’s fascist state.

The collective’s members were only allowed to recognise his authority and that of Chairman Mao Zedong, the founder of modern China, but over time the group’s numbers waned, the men were forced to leave and the dwindling group of women were so dominated and brainwashed they believed he was all-powerful.

Bizarrely, he threatened them with what he called a supernatural mind-control machine which he named “Jackie” – an acronym of Jehovah, Allah, Christ, Krishna and Immortal Easwaran.

The women were allowed no friends or social life and the house was locked all the time which Balakrishnan said was to keep out fascist agents.

“It seems extraordinary that Balakrishnan could command such control over so many people,” said Detective Chief Superintendent Tom Manson in a statement after the verdict.

“However all of the victims have told us in great detail that they very much believed his claims of power and greatness and the threats he made to them.”

Two siblings and their mother, 52, held in Paphos in connection with trafficking 786 grammes of cocaine were released on bail on Monday, pending the start of their trial in January.

The mother, along with her 33-year-old daughter, and son, 24, were arrested earlier this month in the village of Marathounta in connection with the possession with intent to supply of 786 grammes of cocaine.

A 39-year-old Limassol man held for the same case will remain in custody pending trial.

All four have been referred to trial before the Criminal Court, which is scheduled to hold its first hearing on January 18.

The three were released on Monday after signing a €75,000 bail bond each. They will surrender all travel documents and report once daily at a police station.

The trial of the 24-year old suspect in the alleged rape and robbery of a 23-year-old woman from the Netherlands was adjourned by the Paphos criminal court on Tuesday until January 8.

The adjournment is to give time to the defence lawyer to go through the evidence before her client answers the charges. Until then, the suspect is to present himself on a regular basis to a local police station.

According to the Dutch tourist’s complaint, at around 5.30am on October 4 she was on her way home after a night clubbing. A young man on a motorbike offered to give her a lift to the flat she was renting.

Instead, she said, he led her to a remote area where he allegedly raped her. She claimed he then took her handbag with a mobile phone and credit card.

The 23 year-old was examined by a state pathologist and the findings were delivered to police.

The ongoing Paphos Sewerage Board (SAPA) trial was interrupted on Wednesday when former Paphos mayor Savvas Vergas, who is serving a six-year jail term after he confessed to having been paid €0,5 million in kickbacks by project contractors, felt weak and dizzy while being cross-examined.

The court interrupted the proceedings while a doctor was called to the court to tend to Vergas.

Vergas had been responding to a line of questioning regarding his late father’s visits to him while under police custody, when his speech became impaired before he collapsed.

The courtroom was immediately vacated and doctors present – among them, Efstathios Efstathiou and Vasos Vasiliou, two of the defendants – offered the witness first aid.

Shortly thereafter, an ambulance arrived and rushed Vergas to the Paphos general hospital for further examination.

During Tuesday’s session, Vergas was visibly distraught while testifying for the prosecution, to the point where the bench asked him to have some water to regain his composure.

Before the interruption, Vergas had told the court that knowledge of EDEK MP Fidias Sarikas’ – Vergas’ predecessor as Paphos mayor – involvement in the bribery scandal was conveyed to him by SAPA director Eftychios Malekides.

His relationship with Sarikas, Vergas claimed, had always been good, except during the 2006 mayoral election campaign, when the two men were pitted against each other.

Vergas denied having cut a deal with prosecutors, by which his confession would land him a lighter sentence and better detention conditions, saying he was transferred to a safer detention area after he was threatened by a person outside the Central Prisons.

Sarikas’ defence attorney Chris Triantafyllides suggested that Vergas’ testimony can in no way be acceptable to the court, since he acted contrary to his pre-election pledges, indicating his dishonesty, and changed his story “from A to B” after his wife was arrested.

Vergas rejected the suggestion, claiming he confessed without expecting anything in return.

The disgraced former Paphos mayor said he is at ease with his conscience, since he is perhaps the first politician in Cyprus history to have condemned himself.

By Angelos Anastasiou

The Bank of Cyprus’ board of directors had been advised to inform the investing public of the spike in its capital shortfall from €200 million to about €480 million, former financial director Christis Hadjimitsis told the court on Monday.

Taking the stand as a prosecution witness in the trial of five former BoC top officials, Hadjimitsis said that he had duly informed the bank’s leadership of the lender’s capital needs in mid-2012, noting that, considering that the sale of insurance companies had fallen through, the board should have notified investors of the increase in its capital needs.

He added that his department had not recommended the issuance of a profit warning at the time, as this was a matter for the board of directors, and repeated his view that the public should have been made aware of the bank’s real capital needs.

He acknowledged that 2012 was a “very difficult year” for the economy, riddled with uncertainty that drove up projections.

He added that the BoC made “superhuman” efforts to cover its capital shortfalls, a matter it handled “seriously”.

In June, 2012, he noted, the lender was not far from covering its needs, and had it been granted a reasonable extension, it could have attained the target.

Hadjimitsis will be cross-examined on Tuesday.

Former BoC board chairmen Theodoros Aristodemou and Andreas Artemis, former CEOs Andreas Eliades and Yiannis Kypris, and former deputy CEO Yiannis Pehlivanides, as well as the bank itself, are facing charges of conspiracy to defraud and manipulate the market in connection with “not informing the public that the bank’s capital needs had substantially increased from the amount of €200 million that had been announced in May 2012”.

A second criminal case against the Bank of Cyprus and six former top officials, relating to the purchase of Greek bonds by the bank and its failure to inform shareholders of the risk involved, has been set for hearing next month.

Apart from the Bank of Cyprus, Artemi, Eliades, and Kypris, who are also defendants in the first trial, non-executive board members Yiorgos Georgiades, Costas Severis, and Costas Hadjipapas, have also been charged.

On Monday, February 15, the Nicosia district court is expected to refer the first criminal case against now-defunct Laiki Bank to the criminal court, also on charges of market manipulation in 2011.

In addition to the lender, accused are Efthimios Bouloutas, Marcos Foros, Neoclis Lyssandrou, and Panayiotis Kounnis.

Remarks made earlier this month, in which Justice Minister Ionas Nicolaou expressed hope for convictions within 2016 in court cases regarding the economy’s collapse, were misconstrued, he said on Tuesday, noting that he never sought to interfere or influence judicial proceedings.

Nicolaou had been accused of doing so by the defendants in the ongoing Bank of Cyprus trial, in which five former top officials, and the lender itself, are accused of having conspired to mislead investors with regard to the bank’s true capital adequacy.

On Monday, the five defendants’ lawyers sent a letter to Attorney-general Costas Clerides, in which they referred to two interviews Nicolaou gave – one to the Cyprus News Agency on February 3, and another to daily Phileleftheros, on February 15.

In them, the lawyers argued, Nicolaou tried to influence the outcome of judicial proceedings and may have shown contempt of the court that is hearing the Bank of Cyprus case.

“Due to its seriousness, we expect the examination of this matter as soon as possible, in order to protect our clients’ rights, and the stature of justice in general,” the letter said.

In the CNA interview, Nicolaou had said that “it is not impossible to have convictions within 2016” and that the punishment of those responsible for the economic collapse “is not a demand of the public only, but of the government too”.

In the Phileleftheros interview, he stated that “the Legal Service believed that there is adequate evidence to secure a conviction of the accused”, and repeated that “it is expected that these cases will be concluded within 2016 with a view to convicting”.

In response, Nicolaou said he regretted the fact that his remarks had been misinterpreted.

“The sole aim of my comments was to inform the public that investigations are at an advanced stage,” he said.

“Under no circumstances did I want, or seek, to interfere with any judicial proceedings. My remarks were of general nature and did not relate to any particular case, ongoing or not. I express my full respect to the rights of any defendants or suspects, who are covered by the principle of presumption of innocence, which I also respect.”

The justice minister repeated his regret for the fact that his remarks were taken to mean anything other than what he explained, and said that he plans to send a letter to the AG, which he will copy to the lawyers who complained.

By Tina Bellon

A 95-year-old former Nazi SS paramedic at the Auschwitz death camp, accused of being an accomplice to the murder of thousands, is to stand trial in Germany on Monday, one in a series of such recent cases.

Hubert Zafke was serving as a medic in the SS at the biggest death camp in occupied Poland where he was deployed in 1943. During the trial, he will be faced with the accounts of at least two witnesses.

Prosecutors in the northern German city of Schwerin say that Zafke, in his function as a medic, supported the slaughter at Auschwitz, where over 1.2 million people, most of them Jews, were killed.

Zafke was responsible for treating SS members in case of sickness, not any of the inmates, but prosecutors say he was stationed directly on the path leading to the gas chambers.

According to initial investigations, Zafke did not deny having been an SS member at Auschwitz but he maintains not to have witnessed anything about the killings. The prosecutors say that, among being a witness to these gas chambers walks, he also must have been aware of the constant smoke arising from the crematoriums.

A precedent for such cases was set in 2011, when former Nazi guard John Demjanjuk was sentenced for being an accessory to the Nazis’ mass murder during the Holocaust.

Demjanjuk’s conviction, allowing the pursuit of those involved in the death camp apparatus even if no individual murder could be proven, paved the way for late Nazi trials, with at least four Auschwitz cases scheduled this year alone.

Germany’s Nazi past has weighed heavily on the country and even today forms the backdrop to national debates on issues such as how to deal with refugees of war. These latest Nazi trials, among the last as that generation dies out, may help draw a line under this chapter in the country’s history.

Trials are kept short on health grounds because the age of the accused.

Zafke’s charges focus on a month-long period between August and September 1944, when 14 deportation trains from Poland, Slovenia, Greece, Germany and the Netherlands arrived at the camp.

One carried Anne Frank, the German-born Jewish writer, whose “Diary of a young girl” became one of the most widely known witness accounts of the Holocaust, documenting her life in hiding during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands.

Anne Frank and her sister Margot were eventually transferred westwards to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where they died shortly before its liberation in April 1945.

Zafke has already been charged abroad for his role at Auschwitz. In 1946, a Polish court sentenced him to four years in prison. Afterwards, Zafke returned to Germany, where he worked as an agricultural salesman.

FORMER Paphos Sewerage Board (SAPA) director Efthymios Malekides told the court on Wednesday that he never blackmailed project contractors for money, and denied that charges against him were dropped following a plea bargain he made with the Legal Service.

From the stand as a prosecution witness, Malekides said during cross-examination that not only was he not treated favourably, but he paid back more money than he ever received in kickbacks.

After his confession, he added, he was not interested in money, but only to close the case and redeem himself.

He told the court that he wished his own predicament on no one.

One defence lawyer suggested that Malekides had lied in his statement to the police, in which he said that he “never blackmailed any contractors”, but instead was being “threatened, directly or indirectly, by [contractor] Loizos Iordanous” that he would go to jail if he did not cave.

But the defence insisted that the witness was lying, and that, in fact, he was the one blackmailing the contractors.

“Your statement was a fairy tale,” Malekides was told.

Malekides stood firm in his position and repeated that he never blackmailed anyone.

But former Paphos mayor and sitting MP Fidias Sarikas’ lawyer, Chris Triantafyllides, also accused Malekides of being a liar, arguing that he initially professed his innocence, before confessing, and wondered at which point he was telling the truth.

“I’m sorry that you hurl insults in a courtroom,” Malekides replied.

“I am here to give the facts, not respond to your syllogisms.”

Triantafyllides then claimed that Malekides had threatened Sarikas that he would take him down with him if he even got in trouble.

The witness repeated that he never blackmailed anyone.

The defence lawyer referred to a 2011 court case, in which Malekides testified as a witness, suggesting that he had perjured himself to serve “certain expediencies”, and that lying came naturally to him.

But Malekides countered that, although the court’s ruling found his testimony “not material” to the case, it did not suggest that he had told any lies.

In addition to Malekides, accused in the ongoing trial are former municipal councillors Giorgos Michaelides with DISY, Efstathios Efstathiou with DIKO, Vasos Vassiliou with AKEL, and sitting councillor Giorgos Shailis, also with AKEL.

THE evidence heard in court falls well short of demonstrating that the five former Bank of Cyprus (BoC) senior officers conspired to defraud investors by concealing the lender’s true capital needs in 2012, the defendants’ lawyers posited on Thursday during their closing arguments in the ongoing trial.

Attorney Demetris Araouzos, representing defendants Theodoros Aristodemou (former board chairman) and Andreas Artemi (former vice chairman) argued that the state prosecution failed to demonstrate that the bank’s share price had been affected, and therefore market manipulation cannot be proven.

On June 27 2012 BoC’s share was listed at €0.266, on June 28 at €0.259, and on June 29 at €0.285, he noted.

Defence lawyer Chris Triantafyllides, representing Artemi and Yiannis Pehlivanides (former first deputy CEO), said that during the course of the trial not one shred of evidence, whether direct or circumstantial, was presented showing that the defendants had conspired to defraud investors.

The prosecution, said Triantafyllides, focused on the time period between June 14 and June 19, 2012. On June 14, he said, a preparatory meeting did take place in Aristodemou’s office. However, Pehlivanides was absent – he was in Greece at the time – while Artemi was attending another meeting elsewhere.

The attorney pointed out also what he described as disagreements between the testimonies of five prosecution witnesses and Alkis Pierides, a Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) official who was also brought on to testify against the defendants.

Triantafyllides singled Pierides out as the only witness in the trial who had a motive “to vindicate himself” since he was the same person who had earlier conducted a market manipulation probe for CySEC.

In his own testimony, Pierides said the bank had estimated its total capital needs for 2011 at €426 million, despite a “damning letter” from the Central Bank of Cyprus, dated May 10,  2012, which cited two earlier letters, and told the BoC top brass “Gentlemen, you need to raise your provisions.”

Another prosecution witness told the court that in a letter to the Central Bank, dated June 20, 2012 – i.e. one day after an Annual General Meeting of BoC’s shareholders – the bank raised its capital needs to approximately €400 million.

Also on trial are former CEO Andreas Eliades, his successor Yiannis Kypri, and the

Bank itself.

The Nicosia criminal court reconvenes on April 11 to hear the prosecution’s closing arguments.

Twelve people were on Thursday referred to a criminal court where starting on April 26 they will stand trial on corruption and bribery charges in connection with an overcharging scam at the landfills at Marathounda, Paphos and Koshi, Larnaca.

The 12 are: suspended Paphos municipality chief financial officer Demetris Patsalides; interior ministry official Michalis Pantis, the person who oversaw works at the Koshi landfill; interior ministry officers Antonis Kourouzides, Stelios Papadopoulos, and Christakis Petrou, all members of the tenders committee; Larnaca mayor Andreas Louroudjiatis; former interior ministry official Giorgos Koulappis; his son Nicos Koulappis; Jordanian civil engineer Ιmad Baqleh, an employee of the implicated company, Helector; former Paphos mayor Savvas Vergas; former head of the Paphos sewerage board Eftychios Malekides; and Demetris Yiannakopoulos, former director of Helector.

Helector landed the contracts to build and operate the two landfills in Paphos and Larnaca, where it has emerged that the company overcharged by reporting inflated waste volumes in cahoots with interior ministry and local municipality officials.

Nicosia district court ordered the suspects released pending their trial, but they were ordered to surrender their travel documents, their names have been placed on a stop-list, and they must report twice a week to their local police station.
The suspects were also required to post bond ranging from €100,000 to €200,000.

To date the charge sheet comprises 106 counts. The charges include: conspiracy to commit a felony, active bribery of a public official, corruption of a public functionary, abuse of power, obtaining unlawful pecuniary advantage by a public functionary, fraud and abuse of trust by a public official, forgery, obtaining money under false pretences, and money laundering.

The offences span the time period between 2003 and 2015, and were committed in the districts of Paphos, Limassol, Larnaca and Nicosia.
Meanwhile Cypriot extradition requests are pending for two Greek nationals: Leonidas Bobolas, CEO of Helector, and Theofanis Lolos, director of ENVIROPLANT, a firm assigned by the interior ministry to oversee the waste management projects in Marathounda and Koshi.

According to the filed charge sheet, the case over the Marathounda landfill dates back to 2003, when tenders were invited. The site began operating in 2005.
During the course of investigating Marathounda, police uncovered similar practices at the waste management site at Koshi. The initial Koshi contract dates back to 2006.

Police had earlier arrested five other persons, but they were subsequently released without being charged and are likely to take the stand as state’s witnesses.
They include Ioannis Kokotsis, the executive director of Helector since 2010.

During an earlier remand hearing, the court heard that police had located 40 fake invoices at the offices of Helector for sums totalling €200,000 and given as kickbacks to former Paphos mayor Savvas Vergas and to Demetris Patsalides, chief financial officer of Paphos municipality.

However it is thought the bribes to various officials could run in the millions since Helector first landed the waste management contracts.
Helector is a subsidiary of Ellaktor SA, a multinational Greek construction group.

Phedonas Phedonos, the current mayor of Paphos, estimates that the contractor may have raked in more than €30 million from overcharging.

The defendants in the Bank of Cyprus case engaged in a conspiracy of silence to manipulate the market, opting not to discuss the issue of writedowns – and ensuing capital needs – in the board meeting of June 14, 2012, state prosecutor Polina Efthivoulou argued in court on Monday.
Efthivoulou was referring to the defendants in the trial of five former BoC top officials, as well as the lender itself, for market manipulation and misleading investors with regard to the bank’s true capital needs in 2012.
According to the prosecutor, the sum total of the evidence is circumstantial, and as such needs to be examined in its entirety at the conclusion of the trial.
The court will issue a ruling on whether a case against the six defendants can be substantiated, in which case they will be asked to defend themselves, otherwise they will be cleared of all charges, on April 27.
Meanwhile, following a question by the bench, the prosecution withdrew two charges against the Bank of Cyprus, which were based on its failure to report its capital shortfall at the annual general meeting of June 19, 2012.
According to the law, a legal entity is obliged to reveal such information to the investing public through specific channels – namely, in a statement to the Cyprus Stock Exchange or the Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission, or a post on its website – which do not include an annual general meeting.

Former deputy attorney-general Rikkos Erotocritou on Thursday said that, to this day, he strongly feels he has done nothing wrong with regard to his handling of the Providencia case in 2013.

Erotocritou, who is on trial along with lawyers Andreas Kyprizoglou and Panayiotis Neocleous, as well as the Andreas Neocleous law firm, for allegedly colluding to launch criminal prosecutions against Russian nationals battling the Neocleous law firm over ownership of a Russian trust fund – Providencia – in return for arranging a court case Erotocritou had brought Laiki Bank to be concluded in his favour.

The four defendants went on trial after Attorney-general Costas Clerides following a criminal investigation into the Providencia incident, where Erotocritou had allegedly ordered the prosecutions against Clerides’ instructions, by retired judge Panayiotis Kallis, found evidence of the purported transaction.

Grilled by prosecution lawyer Elias Stefanou on Thursday, Erotocritou reiterated his strong belief that he had done “nothing wrong”, and blamed his ordeal on the strained personal relationship he had with Clerides.

The former deputy AG denied having tried to extract information from Clerides regarding the Kallis report before its findings were made public by the AG.

“He locked himself up in his office and further avoided any contact with me,” Erotocritou said.

“Nor was I allowed, based on our relationship up to that point, to talk to him, even in a friendly or collegiate manner. I was informed of the content of his news conference [in which he announced the findings of the Kallis report] when Mr Clerides walked out of his office on his way to the conference, and his secretary gave my secretary an envelope containing the speech he made to the press moments later.”

The calmest of men would find it hard to keep his composure, he added, noting that his earlier involvement in public life as a politician he was “in a position to understand when something was done in good faith and with no bad intention”.

“I realised he had one goal – to throw me out of the Legal Service,” he said.

Erotocritou defended his decisions with regard to the Providencia case by insisting that the criminal prosecutions were ordered on recommendation of police investigators.

However, he denied having any prior knowledge that Clerides was going to appoint a criminal investigator.

“I didn’t talk, or chat, with the attorney-general,” he said.

“He may have spoken with others, but not me.”

The former deputy AG complained about the lengthy cross-examination, noting that “you have me here for three days, accusing me even for the air I breathe”, but later had to retract his comments, asking Stefanou to “take them as a rhetorical statement”.

Returning to an October 2013 meeting with Clerides he had referred to in his statement, in which the AG had called him a donkey for entering his office without knocking, Erotocritou said it had caused a full-blown rift in their relationship.

Asked why he had made no mention of the incident either to Kallis or the Supreme Court, when the body was examining a request by Clerides for his sacking, Erotocritou said he had not thought of it.

Recalling his thoughts on the incident, Erotocritou said it frightened him because he realised the tension Clerides had let out.

“If that was the reaction of a confrontational personality, an extrovert, it would not be dangerous,” he said.

“But to see it from an introvert, that is a very dangerous thing.”

Two former Greek bankers whose arrest was sought after they failed to appear before a Cypriot court, said on Monday they will be present at the May 11 hearing after Greece’s authorities ordered their extradition last week.
Former Laiki Bank board members Efthymios Bouloutas and Markos Foros, will be extradited to Cyprus where they face charges relating to mismanagement at the failed lender.
In a statement issued on Monday, the pair claimed they did nothing wrong. They added that they disagreed with the decision to hand them over to Cyprus but they will respect it nevertheless.
“We express our disappointment over the conditions that the particular decision had been taken,” they said.
Cypriot authorities issued European arrest warrants for Bouloutas and Foros in February, after they failed to appear before court at the inaugural hearing of the case.
The Nicosia district court had convened to rule on whether to refer the case to the criminal court.
The other two defendants, Panayiotis Kounnis and Neoclis Lysandrou, also former board members, were in court.
The four men are accused of having conspired to mislead investors through public statements and inaccurate account reporting in 2011.

The trial against Christakis Thoma, who killed three young men in November last year was postponed to June 30, Limassol criminal court decided on Monday.

This was after Thoma’s defence requested time to study new evidence and to reach an agreement with prosecution as to what both sides would accept as facts of the case to limit the number of witnesses.

Thoma, aged 30 stabbed brothers Paraschos and Constantinos Ntorzis, aged 19 and 21 and Emilios Miltiadous, 24 to death on November 24 last year on a side street off busy Anexartisias street.

The victims of Christakis Thoma (Christoforos Nestoros)

Police had gone on a manhunt to find him and was caught a few days afterwards.

He confessed to the murder saying he had acted out of blind rage as they had gotten into an argument.

President Nicos Anastasiades will take the witness stand on Wednesday, after being called by the defence in the trial of former deputy attorney-general Rikkos Erotokritou, lawyers Andreas Kyprizoglou and Panayiotis Neocleous, and the Andreas Neocleous & Co.

The four are facing charges of conspiracy to obstruct justice and defraud, bribery, corruption, and proxy dealing, in connection with Erotokritou’s dubious decision to launch criminal prosecutions against certain Russian nationals who battled the Neocleous law firm in court over ownership of Providencia, a multi-million euro trust-fund.

An independent probe, conducted by former Supreme Court justice Panayiotis Kallis, found evidence of a conspiracy, with Erotokritou allegedly being rewarded for the prosecutions with a favourable ruling in a personal court-case he had been involved in – worth €0.5 million – and AG Costas Clerides filed charges.

During the trial, Clerides and Erotokritou gave diverging versions of the events surrounding two meetings the two men had with Anastasiades at the Presidential Palace late in 2013.

At these, Clerides claimed, the then newly-appointed AG had explicitly set three conditions to Erotokritou regarding their cooperation, which the deputy AG accepted. All three revolved around the demarcation of duties, with Clerides retaining the final word on all differences of opinion between the two officials.

The AG also claimed Erotokritou had suggested undertaking the Legal Service’s criminal cases, but Clerides refused.

Testifying under oath, Erotokritou referred to the two meetings at the palace, saying no conditions had been set.

The point goes to the heart of the case, as the charges are largely based on the premise that Erotokritou went behind Clerides’ back in launching criminal prosecutions when he had been explicitly instructed to run such decisions by the AG first.

Hence, the only other attendee at the two meetings – Anastasiades – has been called by defence lawyer Christos Pourgourides to give his recollection of events.

The landmark case marks the first time a sitting president will appear in court to testify as a witness.

In mid-May, presiding judge Lena Demetriadou adjourned the trial until June 1st in order to accommodate Anastasiades’ hectic schedule, but noted the president would get no preferential treatment.

“[Adjourning until June] would freeze the process for a prolonged period of time, but we don’t want to stop either side from presenting testimony it considers necessary,” she said.

“If [the president] comes as a witness, he will have to be a witness like any other. There are no ‘special’ witnesses.”

The Nicosia Criminal court will issue its interim ruling on the defence’s request for a Supreme Court referral of the legality of a Cyprus Securities and Exchange Commission (CySEC) regulation, on which the market-manipulation charge in the trial of the Bank of Cyprus, as well as five of its former top officials, on June 14, it was announced on Thursday.

Last week, defence attorney Polis Poliviou had submitted a request for the Supreme Court to rule on his view that the regulation in question was approved in 2011 by the CySEC board, the appointment of which was deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court. Consequently, the board was dismissed and replaced in March 2012 by the cabinet.

The new board approved the regulation again, but with no retroactive scope, Poliviou argued.

In Thursday’s hearing, state prosecutor Polina Efthivoulou argued that it would be wrong to grant the referral at this stage in the trial, citing previous rulings and opinions by legal experts.

The defence, she said, should have raised their request for a Supreme Court referral prior to the Criminal court’s ruling that a ‘prima facie’ case against the defendants exists.

A referral request, she added, constitutes an “extraordinary measure that must be employed very sparingly, as it disrupts the proceedings”.

Efthivoulou argued that the issues raised by the defence can be examined on appeal before the Supreme Court, if the defendants are found guilty.

“In order to approve the referral and disrupt the trial, the question must be critical enough that the court feels that, if left unanswered by the Supreme Court, the trial cannot proceed,” the prosecutor said.

All six defendants – the Bank of Cyprus, former board chairmen Theodoros Aristodemou and Andreas Artemi, former CEOs Andreas Eliades and Yiannis Kypri, and former deputy CEO Yiannis Pehlivanides – are facing the market-manipulation charge in connection with their failure to inform the public from June 14 to June 26, 2012, that the lender’s capital shortfall, announced the previous month at €200 million, was in fact more than double that.

The BoC, Aristodemou, and Eliades, are also facing a charge of having misrepresented the value of the bank’s financial holdings to the shareholders at their annual general meeting on June 19, 2012.

Aristodemou and Eliades also face an additional charge, against relating to the AGM. They are accused of having withheld crucial information regarding the bank’s capital shortfall from the shareholders.