GREECE Trends and Developments Contributed by: Ovvadias S. Namias, Vasileios Petropoulos, Ilias Spyropoulos and Emmanouil Apostolakis, Ovvadias S. Namias Law Firm
Under Greek law, there is no legal obligation for companies (or groups of companies) to carry out internal investigations. The Greek Code of Crimi - nal Procedure does not provide any information regarding the permitted or prohibited nature of private investigations. As a result, the area of corporate or intra-group investigations in the Greek legal system can be regarded as a legal vacuum. However, it is accepted that the investi - gation of crimes is not exclusively granted to the state, which gives private internal investigations There is still no specific legal framework in Greece concerning the conduct of internal investigations, and the Greek Code of Criminal Procedure does not provide any information on the nature of (private) internal reviews. Therefore, there is a lack of standardisation of the proce - dure for both the collection and the recording of investigative findings. something of a permissible quality. Internal Investigations in Greece It appears that an increasing number of crimi - nal cases from Greek legal practice are based on material collected and evaluated by means of internal examinations. Under the Greek legal system, investigations within the company can take place either voluntarily, after a Board of Directors’ (BoD) decision, or on the initiative of the state authorities. In the former case, the pur - pose of self-regulation is not to avoid criminal conduct, but to uncover and penalise it later. In the latter example, certain public authorities, such as the Capital Market Commission in the case of listed companies, are permitted to com - mission private bodies, such auditing or legal firms, to carry out an internal investigation. Of course, there is also the traditional route, ie, the internal investigation can be led by the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which carries out the inves - tigations with the help of state authorities, such
as the Financial Police and the Economic Crimes Department of the Tax Office, etc. Recent judicial practice has shown that conduct - ing an internal investigation at an early stage of a criminal case is crucial for the effective gather - ing of evidence and a speedy trial. So there are many benefits to this practice, not just for the company that commissions the internal investi - gation, but also for the state, as follows. • First, an objective third party, with suffi - cient human resources, relevant expertise, and appropriate means (depending on the particularities of each case), collects and assesses the evidence in an efficient manner. In this way, it becomes clear from the outset whether or not there is adequate evidence of the commission of a specific offence, and the referral of cases that have not been adequately processed in the pre-trial stage is thus avoided. • Prosecutors and investigative offices, as well as supervisory authorities, often lack the necessary resources to effectively pursue a complex criminal case. Therefore, conducting an internal investigation either at the initiative of the company concerned or of the Prosecu - tor’s Office would lead to savings of critical state resources, and would also prevent the risk of an incomplete investigation of the case. • The practice of internal investigations will help speed up all stages of the criminal pro - cedure. This development would be beneficial on many levels for a country such as Greece, where there are serious delays in the adminis- tration of justice.
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