The council of Ministers approved a new leadership for the country’s highest court on Tuesday, naming Panagiotis Lymperopoulos as president of the Supreme Court and Evangelos Bakelas as its prosecutor general.
The appointments followed a recommendation by Justice Minister George Floridis and was also in line with the outcome of the vote held among senior judges and prosecutors, as well as a hearing before the conference of parliamentary group leaders. Both men had been seen as front-runners, and the support they drew in the court’s internal ballot and at their parliamentary hearing appears to have weighed on the minister’s final call.
Lymperopoulos, until now a vice president and the court’s press spokesman, will serve as president through 2030. He succeeds Anastasia Papadopoulou, who is stepping down as she has reached the mandatory retirement age. Bakelas, a deputy prosecutor at the court, takes over from Konstantinos Tzavellas for a two-year term running to June 2028.
The pair inherit a difficult brief. Their tenure will cover several of the most closely watched cases in the country, among them the Predator wiretapping scandal, the Tempi rail disaster, and OPEKEPE, the farm-subsidy fraud investigation. Beyond the individual cases, the harder task is restoring public trust in the judiciary, which has been badly strained in recent years.
The new president
Lymperopoulos joined the bench in September 1993 and was promoted to the Supreme Court in 2023. In 2025 he became a vice president and took over the court’s Fifth Criminal Division. He has served as the court’s press and international relations spokesman since late 2023.
He has taught at the National School of Judges, with courses on judicial time management, court administration, and judicial ethics. He was also active for many years in the judges’ and prosecutors’ union, sitting on its board from 2002 to 2020 and serving as vice president and deputy secretary general.
The new prosecutor general
Bakelas entered the prosecution service in June 1991 and was promoted to deputy prosecutor at the Supreme Court in July 2024. He holds a postgraduate degree in criminal and forensic sciences from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and has taught at the National School of Judges since 2011, becoming a lead instructor in 2022 on criminal procedure, the enforcement of court rulings, and the penal code.
He was a prominent figure in the prosecutors’ union, winning election to its board for four consecutive terms from 2018 until February of this year. He served twice as the union’s president, in 2021 to 2024 and again in 2025 to 2026, and twice as vice president.
