Filenews 17 October 2025 - by Theano Thiopoulou
The unforgettable era of the collapse of the banks and the closure of Laiki Bank is brought back by the decision of the Supreme Constitutional Court (appellate jurisdiction) the day before yesterday, focusing on the Capital Market Commission and the former bank executives and then members of the bank's board of directors, Efthymios Bouloutas, Eleftherios Chiliadakis, Markos Forou and Panagiotis Kounnis.
The decision has a past dating back to 2014, when the Hellenic Capital Market Commission imposed a total administrative fine of €1,395 million to the four appellants, for violation of the legislation on transparency requirements and for violation of article 20(4) of the Public Offer and Information Bulletin Law.
The court's new decision on the appeal does not vindicate the four, who must pay several thousand euros each as an administrative fine.
As the facts are recorded in the court decision, the Hellenic Capital Market Commission, in its session, dated 28.4.2014, found violations of the law and imposed on Mr. Bouloutas an administrative fine of a total amount of €705,000 and on Mr. Chiliadakis, Mr. Foros and Mr. Kounnis administrative fines of €170,000, €90,000 and €430,000, respectively.
The disputed issues for the appeal of the four former executives were three:
– allegation of bias by the chairwoman of the Hellenic Capital Market Commission (11 eleven years ago), whether the principles of good faith and good administration were violated, in view of the fact that the Hellenic Capital Market Commission approved the prospectuses in question and therefore, as stated, the respondent (Hellenic Capital Market Commission) is prevented from claiming that they did not meet the requirements of the law.
– They also raised the issue of whether specific articles of the legislation gave the power to the Capital Market to impose an administrative fine on them.
In the context of the same procedure, administrative fines were imposed on other persons, including the bank, which was found to have violated article 40(1) of Law 190(I)/2007, as it published misleading data in the semi-annual financial reports of the years 2010 and 2011 as well as in the annual report of the year 2010.
In particular, it was stated that the risks to which the group was exposed were not expected to change substantially during the second half of 2010, while the risk of Greek government bonds on 30.6.2010 was higher, compared to 31.12.2009, as since April 2010 DSBs were rated by international rating agencies at non-investment grade and in particular as "junk". It was found that in the report of the Board of Directors, which was part of the bank's annual financial report for the year ended 31.12.2010, no description of the risks from the DSBs was made, nor was any comparison of the amount of the investment in DSBs with the total equity. Therefore, as mentioned, rational investors were not informed about the serious risks of DSBs.
