State attorney Eleni Loizidou who made headlines two years ago after thousands of her emails which were published indicated an excessive zeal from her part in pursuing extradition requests against Russian nationals, is reportedly seeking an additional €2m in damages from daily Politis, it emerged on Sunday.
Loizidou secured an injunction against the paper in January 2018 prohibiting Politis from publishing contents from her email account. Her personal Gmail account had been hacked and thousands of her emails published on a Russian website which Politis reproduced.
Her emails indicated an excessive zeal in pursuing extradition requests against Russian nationals submitted by the Russian Federation’s prosecutor-general. When the emails were made public, she was moved to another department of the state legal services by the attorney-general, but was subsequently suspended pending an investigation into her use of a personal email account for official business.
At the time, a media storm followed with newspapers, radio and TV stations running the story both locally and abroad. Loizidou’s injunction barred Politis from publishing or using contents from the emails, something the paper decried saying it was not the only publication which carried the story.
The state attorney was also at the time seeking damages between €500,000 and €2m from the paper.
On Sunday, Politis published a damning article saying Loizidou was seeking further damages up to €2m alleging that the paper had not adhered to the court injunction and had filed another lawsuit against newspaper’s publisher, director and six journalists.
The paper wrote that Loizidou had apparently searched online on December 2, 2019 and found the articles which were published before the injunction was in place.
“Despite its disagreement, Politis fully respected the injunction and since January 10, 2018, never published anything related to the contents of Mrs. Loizidou’s emails,” the paper said.
Politis outlined that the material Loizidou found online when were published before the injunction was in place and not after.
In some of the leaked emails from Loizidou’s personal account, she appears to request favours from Russian officials, including support for a judge position at the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) of the Council of Europe, or even, though jokingly, a job if she was sacked for passing information to Russia.
The cabinet had appointed an investigating officer to investigate the possibility of disciplinary offenses by Loizidou who was suspended until the probe was completed.
According to Politis, she was found to have fault for dumping the laptop she was using for business abroad after breaking down and for using her personal e-mail account for business purposes instead that of her work.
The paper slammed that the essence of the matter – the content of her emails – was ignored and no information was made public as to who the source of the leaks was.
Politis on Sunday also reported that Loizidou, along with her son which reportedly also works at the state legal service, has a separate lawsuit seeking “a few more hundreds of thousands of euros”.
