Greece: Bakoyannis settles million euro transfer mystery
Monday, 5 March 2012
(ANSAmed) - ATHENS, FEBRUARY 29 - Former New Democracy foreign minister Dora Bakoyannis on Tuesday identified her businessman husband, Isidoros Kouvelos, as the mystery man behind a 1 million euro transfer abroad, putting an end to days of speculation on a transaction held up as an example of political hypocrisy.
The row, as daily Athens News reports today, broke out after the head of an independent watchdog to combat money laundering, Panayiotis Nikoloudis, claimed a member of parliament had exported 1 million euros last year to a Swiss bank. Days of frenzied chatter in the media over the identity of the MP followed, with politicians taking turns to decry the transfer and urging the culprit to come forward.
The guessing game finally came to end on Tuesday when Dora Bakoyannis, head of the small Democratic Alliance party, said a parliamentary committee had called to tell her the person in question was her husband.
An outraged Bakoyannis, who said her husband had transferred the sum abroad to buy a ship, demanded to know how a legal business transaction by a non-politician could have been built up into a scandal. Bakoyannis called the claims were "slanderous" and "farcical" - insisting that her husband, a businessman, had transferred money to London after selling shares in the United States.
"We are all convinced that this has to do with a lawmaker and finally it has to do with the business dealings of a person who has been doing that job forever," Bakoyannis said in parliament. "It is ethical to allow Greek shipping activity to continue.
It is ethical to be married to a Greek businessman. And this has nothing to do with one's political activity, identity or being." Greeks have withdrawn some 65 billion euros in bank savings since the debt crisis picked up steam in 2009, stashing most of it at home or in safety deposit boxes in fear the country might have to return to the drachma.
Posts
