September 2021

Order of the Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal Accepting the Appeal and Prosecuting Felony Fraud in Court

An order of the Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal was recently issued, which upheld the appeal filed by our client against an order of the Prosecutor of the District Court of Appeal rejecting a complaint filed by us.

More specifically, our client - in the context of a fierce and long-lasting dispute - filed a criminal complaint against the legal representative of the opposing company, as well as its accountant, in order to investigate the commission of the offences of felony fraud on the court and false testimony. Our client's complaint was filed by the Public Prosecutor of the District Court on the grounds that, firstly, the crime of the complained fraud was eliminated due to the late submission of our complaint and, secondly, an attempted fraud was committed due to the dismissal of the complaint as essentially unfounded, which is no longer punishable under the new Criminal Code (Law 4619/2019). Subsequently, an appeal against the above dismissal order was legally brought by our client before the Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal, refuting the allegations of the Prosecutor of the District Court as follows: Firstly, the time limit for filing a complaint starts from the moment when the beneficiary learned of the committed criminal act and not from the date of its commission and, secondly, an appropriate (and not inappropriate) attempt to commit fraud on the court was established, as the fulfilment of the relevant objective hypostasis of the above-mentioned offence was not reasonably excluded a priori. In particular, we stated: 'Finding that there was good cause for the termination of the cooperation agreement between us and the opposing party, the Court of Appeal entered into the merits of the specific claim, namely the claim for damages for loss of profits, examined it thoroughly and found the claim to be substantially unfounded. However, as has already been explained, in order to establish the existence of an improper attempt to defraud the court, it is necessary, first, that the means used or the object of the attempt should be reasonably impossible to complete and, second, that it should be reasonably excluded in advance. In the present case, however, the fulfilment of the objective requirement of fraud on the court could not be excluded a priori, since, in accordance with the principle of the free assessment of evidence in civil proceedings, the Court of Appeal could find otherwise on the basis of the evidence adduced...'. In other words, we argued that for the attempt to be found inadmissible, the contested action, through which the attempted fraud was committed, should have been dismissed as inadmissible (for vagueness, for example) and not as substantively unfounded. Our above-mentioned appeal was finally upheld and the Prosecutor of the Court of Appeal ordered the prosecution of the legal representative of the opposing party for the offences of aggravated felony fraud in court, attempted felony fraud in court and instigating a false statement, as well as the accountant of the opposing party for the offence of making a false statement.