By Ioanna Mandrou

It wasn’t even pronounced, that is, it didn’t even formally start and today the trial for the case of the company Folli Follie, while the court, the Tripartite Court of Criminal Appeals, where the trial of the case was supposed to begin, set a new date with the new judicial year.

The trial with the former major shareholders of the company, Dimitris and George Koutsoliutso, and their former associates and executives in the company, was finally set to be heard on September 14.

The new hearing was given without the case being decided and therefore it is not a question of stopping the trial but of a new trial.

The judicial adventures for the trial of the case, which is a serious financial scandal and indeed with an international dimension, as the president of this trial had emphasized, when last December she was forced to postpone it until June 19, as the trial had essentially been frozen due to a multi-month abstention of lawyers.

Then the president Maria Andreopoulou, causing a sensation, decided to stop the trial and set a date for it to be held on June 19 as for months the trial was interrupted and did not proceed as the lawyers had – and continue to – declare abstention from trials with offenses such as that of the criminal organization, disagreeing with legislation passed by the previous New Democracy government.

With this regulation, it was defined that whoever was convicted of a criminal organization, whether a small or a large sentence, if he collected it, he would go to prison, that is, he would not have the right to suspend the serving of his sentence.

Then, last December, when the trial of Folli Follie was postponed, the president sounded the alarm about the possibility of deleting some acts of the heaviest indictment, as the financial scandal that brought the former major shareholders of the company to the dock had developed over time (with falsified balance sheets, etc.) until exposed and brought to justice.

After the postponement of December and in view of the risk that some acts that are burdened by the defendants will be time-barred, the Athens Bar Association, on the initiative of its president Dimitris Vervesos, gave permission to the lawyers of the trial to appear so that the trial could take place.

However, today the trial was once again extended, increasing the risk of statute of limitations for certain acts of the indictment, while its conclusion if all goes smoothly will not take place before the middle of 2024.

The charges facing the former major shareholders of the company and its executives are criminal organization, fraud, forgery and other financial crimes, most, if not all, of which are felonies.