“George Tragas had been checked seven or eight times by the SDOE and the competent Authority for money laundering and tax evasion after buying real estate in Greece. In one of them (for the villa in Kassiopi, Corfu) he had declared as purchase price 10% of the real one, using for the purchase of the property worth 1,200,000 euros a British offshore company with a share capital of 1,000 euros. “
“Then there was a 'raid' on a law firm on Faiaka Island to find the tax evasion trick. “There were also checks for the sale of a sports newspaper, where again it seems that much larger amounts were declared, but also for the deposit of the order of 1,000,000 euros he made in the French bank BNB Baribas, where other suspicious transactions of his colleagues have been found”, he points out speaking in “Vima tis Kyriakis” a government official who knows the content of the checks on the assets, and not only, of the 72-year-old journalist who passed away on December 14, 2021 from a coronavirus.
Testimonies for blackmail
The same government official continues: “In one or two cases, there were movements of auditors of his financial data that had caused questions about the time they were made. He was also initially convicted (in several cases he was acquitted) with “holes” that often exceeded 10 million euros. Later, however, he presented documents for the sale of assets and mainly the sale of SMEs that he owned. “Checks were made after his name was mentioned in the” Lagarde List “and the” Panama Papers “, without follow-up.”
Regarding the allegations of money laundering made by the 60-page report on the suspicious sale of real estate, he stressed that “there were informal testimonies of dozens of individuals – many of them in person – from the shipping, commercial and insurance sectors, who claimed that fell victim to blackmail following allegations of “illegality” and some indirect threats to tax audits.
In fact, some of them presented to the auditors videos from his broadcasts or excerpts of leaflets that reflected the hints against specific companies that formed the basis of behind-the-scenes negotiations.
Some claimed that they gave for at least three years “monthly”, some times and in the form of advertising costs, between 30,000 and 60,000 euros.
We received these complaints without official registration and without a complete crossover mechanism. That's why there are reports of “extortion” in the report, but no further details “after the death of the media representative in question.”
Property over 100 million .
These reports concern checks carried out on the owner of several SMEs, who also appeared as the owner of 17 luxury homes in Greece and abroad and the owner of bank accounts and lockers, the value of which exceeds EUR 100 million.
Luxury properties are located in Monaco, Paris, Nice, France, New York, Miami as well as the Acropolis, Ekali, Corfu and elsewhere. Without of course being able to fully cross-check whether the reported complaints of businessmen made in recent weeks to the Authority for money laundering, under the chairmanship of the former prosecutor of the Supreme Court Charalambos Vourliotis.
“Pending audits »
With the Athens lawyer Nikos Agapinos, the legal representative of the deceased, noting speaking to “Vima” that “these are probably excessive estimates. However, I am able to know, based on a relevant question that I had addressed to the financial authorities following his order, that there were still pending audits of his assets. “
” But all these previous audits and the judicial investigations concerned the properties in Greece and not those abroad, the existence of which was made public in his will but also from the conclusion of the Authority for money laundering “.
In addition, as other lawyers have pointed out, no one can know the validity or even the expediency of the complaints allegedly made to the Authority by individuals for suspicious pressure from the deceased.
The purchase and sale of his real estate
A number of companies were used to buy and sell his property, such as Tragkas Georgios Sole Trader Company based in France, which owns the luxury residence in Nice.
The activation of Manorgold Ltd. is extremely interesting. It appears to have been created in 2002 and is still active and used (last recorded in October 2021) to hide the exact amount of money bought and sold in Corfu.
Established in London based in the UK as a corporate service provider. The shareholder of this company is a resident of Rethymno who is said to be the owner of a yacht sale company, who also appears as a shareholder in similar corporate schemes. The deceased journalist also ran Family Line Ltd, which owns the Miami-based property and was founded in the British Virgin Islands in April 2016, Nevada-based Veer View LLC and Delaware-based Pennview LLC. p>
On the Lagarde List and the Panama Papers
The journalist's name was also found in the “Lagarde List” with the names of 2,059 Greek depositors in the Geneva branch of HSBC bank. He then claimed to have an old savings account at Midland Bank in Athens, which was acquired by HSBC shortly afterwards. Greece, an invisible shareholder of the invisible company from Panama Tacana Portofolio LTD, which was founded on November 28, 2014 and appears active until today.
Millions of income, unpaid employees
Many views have been expressed about the acquisition of the property of George Tragas, such as that his newspapers, for example “Chora” and others, had huge revenues from government agencies, of the order of 6% of the total advertising expenditure, when their circulation was only 0.3% of the total circulation of the daily press.
As well as the excellent relations that maintained with political and official actors. And all this while employees of his publications had filed complaints that they were being left unpaid. that the deceased journalist had received several million euros from a pre-trial businessman, in order to highlight in his TV show at the time, his health problems in order to be released.
