The lawyer representing victims of Greece’s wiretapping scandal filed a fresh petition on Tuesday to reopen the shelved Predator case, citing as new evidence Tal Dilian’s admission, in an Israeli court filing, that he sold the Predator spyware to Greek authorities.
Kesses filed the petition with the Supreme Court prosecutor’s office, asking that the shelved case be reopened and reinvestigated. The significance of Dilian’s filing, he said, is that an official court document now has him admitting he sold Predator to the Greek state, while denying any role in how it was used.
The petition rests on the lawsuit Dilian, the founder of Intellexa, has brought against one of his Greek victims, seeking damages for defamation before a court in Israel. From the wording of that filing, Kesses argued, Dilian himself draws a clear and unambiguous distinction between the facts he treats as true and those he casts as false and defamatory. Dilian invokes the sale of Predator to Greek state authorities as a fact he does not dispute, and indeed calls “entirely legal,” setting it against the claim he deems defamatory: that he was personally involved in using Predator for illegal surveillance in Greece, in cooperation with the national intelligence service, the EYP.
On that basis, Kesses said, the Supreme Court prosecutor’s office must act at once, retrieving the file, requesting certified copies of the Israeli documents through international judicial assistance, and weighing them within the criminal investigation. It should also summon Dilian to testify, he said, and if his standing as a defendant is treated as a reason to doubt his credibility, the prosecutor can instead call Intellexa’s technical director, its administrative head and three technicians, none of whom has ever testified and whose roles surfaced in the first-instance trial over the wiretaps.
Kesses cast the move as a matter of principle, saying the code of values held by his clients and by himself demands the non-negotiable defense of the rule of law, the constant pursuit of truth and accountability against every form of cover-up in the case.
He pressed the point on the prosecutor directly. Evangelos Bakelas, as the official handling the case, is obliged to rise to the occasion, safeguard the standing of the justice system and investigate what Kesses called the largest scandal of Greece’s Third Republic, the democratic era that began with the fall of the military junta in 1974. Anything less, he said, would perpetuate the institutional wound.
Asked about a recent interview given by Grigoris Dimitriadis, Kesses noted that Dimitriadis had said he knows a great deal but chooses not to speak. Defendants have the right to silence, Kesses observed, while witnesses have a duty to tell the truth.
The new petition comes after a series of related requests on the same case and will be joined with them before the Supreme Court prosecutor. The most recent was filed by former Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, himself a target of Predator, who has called for a thorough investigation.
