2024-04-08 02:02:45
Maria Tataki allegedly “forgot” 1,000 cases in her friend’s warehouse in Corfu
The trial of the former head of the Corfu First Instance Prosecutor’s Office, Maria Tatakis, was suspended for April 10, who is accused of having hidden almost 1,000 case files in her friend’s warehouse, in the village of Garouna, with the intention of disappearing them! Both the accused former First Instance prosecutor and her co-accused, the former deputy head of the Directorate of the Office of the Prosecutor’s Office, requested an adjournment, due to the obstruction of their lawyers. However, the seat of the Three-member Court of Criminal Appeals of Ioannina rejected both requests, ultimately deciding on a stay.
The former public prosecutor Maria Tataki is accused of criminal abuse of power and of embezzlement of public documents. By decision of the Plenary of the Supreme Court, on April 14, 2022, he was dismissed from the judiciary, without the right to work. The entanglement of the case, unprecedented in judicial history, began to unravel in February 2019, when the then appeals prosecutor of Corfu requested from her subordinate the primary prosecutor three criminal files for which she had received complaints that their processing was delayed. Among them was the complaint of a local association for continuous pollution of the environment at the landfill.
Then a fight broke out between the two prosecutors that led to the transfer of both to Athens, until the situation was clarified. In February 2020, when their successors took office, it was found that many case files had grown “wings”, however the case took a new turn when, in a raid on the friendly house of the audited prosecutor, in the village of Garouna, 1,000 case files were found! The estimate was that it was almost all of the case files that were lost by the courts of Corfu, a loss that made many talk about a Corfu precedent, with the aim of the statute of limitations for dozens of serious offenses described in them, as well as impunity for defendants in serious cases , among which were some shocking names of the island.
On September 9, 2020, following a question from Justice Minister Costas Tsiaras, the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) convened to decide whether Maria Tataki should be put on holiday or not. In front of the supreme judicial council, she herself had not managed to give convincing answers, nor did she answer many questions of the Areopagites about the way dozens of files were “lost”, as well as boxes containing particularly important files from the courts of Corfu, with the consequence that finally put on holiday.
However, she had caused a sensation with her statement to startmedia that a cat she got in 2017 was responsible for transferring the files! “In October 2017 I got a little kitten and my house was full of fleas. I was forced to stay elsewhere and moved away from my home. Also, almost all the furniture and household goods (clothing and related) were removed from my house. Many people came to the house, I painted it and the man came to spray six times. Then, a close family friend helped me and I moved everything that was in my house to her own house in the village,” Mrs. Tataki had mentioned, among other things.
At the same time, he had asked himself: “What reason would I have to hide them (inv.: the case files)?” Also, some defendants have been tried many times by me… As I told you, the majority were old, but there were apparently others in there, from what I was told up to the time of execution in 2016. These had really escaped me and not even , silly as it is, I didn’t think about that move or what it all entailed.” To date, the fate of 156 case files remains unknown. Legal circles believe that the trial of the former First Instance prosecutor will be of particular interest, since it is also characterized by another peculiarity: according to information, they were never summoned for examination by the then special appellate investigator of Corfu, and therefore the victims will not be summoned to court in cases which have been barred.
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