It took us back to the days when the Attorney General and the Auditor General traded public statements on serious matters of state, forcing the public to pick a side. As if state affairs had been turned into a football match, terraces and all. Eventually Odysseas Michaelidis left that particular stage (he’s on a different one now), but Giorgos Savvides stayed on, and strangely enough, here we go again, the terraces going back up.
This time the statements are flying between the Attorney General and the Transparency Commissioner, who heads the Authority Against Corruption. We’re staring down something enormous today: wiretapping, espionage, conflicts of interest at the very top of the state. Precisely because the stakes are this high, the government has a duty to step in and get clear, final answers. It cannot keep washing its hands of the matter by repeating the same tired line that none of this is its business.
When independent authorities go to war with each other, it’s the government that ends up exposed, and the public that’s left in the dark. So it falls to the government to provide answers and solutions, perhaps by appointing an independent inquiry (an idea floated in public debate yesterday; there may be others). But if it opts for silence instead, the problem won’t just persist. It will grow.
This case is especially serious. It touches on the enormous issue of espionage and wiretapping (the same central figures, with their “black van,” caused trouble in Greece too, where one of them was convicted). And it draws in the Assistant Attorney General, Savvas Angelidis, over allegations of a conflict of interest. That’s exactly where the statement war between the Attorney General and the Authority Against Corruption is now centred: the Authority is effectively accusing the Attorney General of blocking its investigation to protect his own colleague. That’s the implication hovering over all this, wrapped in vagueness and procedural riddles that only deepen the confusion.
This should be simple. The moment a senior official at one of the state’s highest institutions faces an allegation of a conflict of interest, the authorities should launch whatever investigation is needed, either to clear his name or to establish whether the allegations hold up. What’s happening instead, especially through this back-and-forth of statements, is nothing but a smokescreen. One that leaves the shadows hanging over both the Assistant Attorney General and the Attorney General himself.
The criminal investigation into the “black van” affair wrapped up in 2021, with Assistant Attorney General Savvas Angelidis leading it. But after it closed, Fanis Makridis revealed a possible conflict of interest: the Israeli businessman behind the black van, Avraham Sachak Avni, had business dealings with Angelidis’s brother. Given that Angelidis was the one deciding whether to prosecute Avni or not, there’s no question the potential conflict should have been investigated. He should have pushed for it himself. But above all, the government should have made sure it happened. Otherwise the public will never fully trust these institutions and the people who run them, however many legal theories and procedural mazes their heads choose to hide behind.
P.S. The Independent Authority Against Corruption decided to launch its own investigation into every angle of this case after the publication of Fanis Makridis’s book, “Cyprus, the Hub of Wiretapping,” which devotes a substantial chapter to the possible conflict of interest involving Angelidis. The Attorney General cancelled the investigation. We’re not interested in the “yes, buts.” What matters is the substance: do the Attorney General and his deputy not want this investigation to happen? And why not?
If, after the Authority’s “mafia state” findings, they recused themselves to protect the impartiality of those investigations, why not guarantee the same impartiality here, in a case that touches one of them directly?
