The trial for the Folli Follie scandal begins: The Koutsolioutsou family and 10 other defendants are on the bench

Folli Follie founder Dimitris Koutsolioutsos, his son and his wife, as well as 10 co-accused, will face the judges of the three-member Criminal Court of Appeals today for the big case of inaccurate financial data presented for a number of years by the Greek good stock market image.

The trial for the so-called big financial scandal of Folli Follie that took on international dimensions is expected to start today with the two protagonists of the case, the father and the son Koutsolioutsos, being temporarily detained for the case from September 2020 and with the highest their pre-trial detention limit expires next March.

The defendants, mainly company executives, are facing a series of crimes related to the activities of a criminal organization, the acts of which, according to what is attributed to the massive case, caused damage estimated at more than 400 million euros.

The indictment that has been drawn up for the case attributes, on a case-by-case basis, to the defendants the offenses of criminal organization, forgery jointly and severally with total benefit and corresponding damage over 120,000 euros, fraud in conspiracy and continuously committed against natural and legal entities, NPIDs and NPDDs with a loss of more than 120,000 euros, joint market manipulation, professionally and continuously and money laundering from conspiracy and continuous criminal activities. The founder of the Group, Dimitris Koutsolioutsos, will also be tried for the crime of abuse of privileged information continuously and professionally.

The countdown to the alleged large-scale fraud of private and legal entities, private and public, by the former state-owned jewelry company, actually began in the first months of 2018, when a report by the US investment fund Quintessential Capital Management (QCM) was published, which referred to that some financial data of FF Group may not be accurate. The objections of the controversial report of QCM were the trigger for financial audits of the Group’s activities and the judicial investigation that started in June 2018. It is worth noting that on the day this report was published, the capitalization of Folli Follie on the Greek stock exchange exceeded 1 billion euros.

The audits revealed, according to the case file, the action of a criminal organization that started in 2006 with Dimitris Koutsolioutsos as its leading figure and its main lever the Group’s companies in Asia. The accused, executives of the Group, created a false image of a prosperous company with huge amounts of cash through forged certificates and banking data, while creating fraudulent sales records through circular transactions mainly between the Group’s subsidiaries. With this latest trick regarding the turnover of the Group, the defendants for a number of years are said to have maintained a flawless showcase, succeeding in presenting to the investors an extremely robust business scheme. It is indicative that from the data of the audits carried out and included in the case file, it emerged that appearing 296 million euros as available funds in the Asian part during the financial year 2017, was finally only 6 million euros. At the same time, through the consolidated balance sheets presented by the Group and in combination with its false turnover, it achieved comfortable access to high loans.

The position of the main defendant and founder of the company, Dimitris Koutsolioutsou, against what is attributed to him, is that he and his family have not obtained any illegal property benefit and that he has allocated all his personal money for the development of the Group.

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