1. What is the current legal landscape for White Collar Crime in your jurisdiction?

The Greek white-collar regime is best understood not as a closed catalogue of economic offences, but as an enforcement architecture in which substantive criminal law, preventive anti-money laundering duties, regulatory sanctions and asset forfeiture measures increasingly converge. The decisive legal event is often not the final judgment, but an earlier intervention – a search, a production order, a suspicious-transaction report or a freezing measure – taken before criminal responsibility has been finally determined. This has shifted the practical centre of gravity of defence work towards the earliest stage of the matter.

The legal framework and the relevant criminal statutes are dispersed across the Penal Code, the Code of Criminal Procedure and sector-specific legislation. The core offences encountered in practice include fraud, embezzlement, breach of trust, public- and private-sector bribery, tax and customs offences, market abuse, subsidy and procurement fraud, and money laundering under Law 4557/2018. The Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure introduced in 2019 have since been amended repeatedly, including substantial changes in 2024. Date-specific analysis is therefore essential: the applicable offence, limitation period, procedural route and remedy may depend on when the alleged conduct occurred.

Enforcement is both interconnected and increasingly asset-focused. A single event can engage the public prosecutor, the Economic Police, the Hellenic Financial Intelligence Unit, tax or customs authorities, a sectoral regulator and, where the EU’s financial interests are affected, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. EPPO activity in Greece has made EU subsidy, procurement, VAT and Recovery and Resilience Facility matters a permanent part of the landscape rather than an exceptional category. Cross-border requests for evidence and financial intelligence now arrive earlier and move faster, while the same factual record may be assessed under different legal standards in parallel proceedings.

Substantive criminal liability remains personal: the prosecution must prove the conduct and fault attributable to the individual concerned. Greek law does not, as a general rule, impose criminal liability stricto sensu on legal persons; special legislation instead provides for autonomous administrative liability and sanctions, including where an offence benefits the entity or inadequate supervision facilitates it. Article 45 of Law 4557/2018 is particularly important. The doctrinal distinction must be maintained, even where the corporate consequences are functionally punitive: substantial fines, restrictions on business activity, exclusion from public funding or procurement, and serious reputational damage.

Asset restraint is often the first decisive event in a case. A freezing measure is provisional in legal form, but may determine business continuity and the economics of the defence long before the merits are tested at trial. The response must therefore examine the legal basis of the measure, the evidential nexus between the property and the alleged offence, proportionality, ownership, third-party rights and duration. Confiscation cannot be treated solely as an issue for the end of proceedings. This will become still more significant as Greece implements Directive (EU) 2024/1260 on asset recovery and confiscation.

The system’s central difficulty is an asymmetry of time and review. Information-gathering and coercive measures operate early, often across borders; full adjudication of criminal responsibility comes later, and challenges may be fragmented across criminal, regulatory, tax and civil forums. Complex investigations can accordingly last for years while their practical consequences are immediate. Effective defence requires one verified chronology, one controlled evidential record and a strategy that anticipates how each step will affect every other proceeding. White-collar practice in Greece is therefore no longer only trial advocacy; it is the disciplined management of multi-authority and multi-jurisdictional risk from the first indication of an investigation.

2. What three essential pieces of advice would you give to clients involved in White Collar Crime matters?

First, act early and proactively. Create a privileged response structure immediately. The first 48 hours often shape the next two years. Identify who is instructing external counsel, who may be personally exposed, which systems and devices contain relevant material, and who is authorised to communicate with authorities, employees, auditors, banks and the media. An internal review should be carefully scoped and lawyer-led. A well-intentioned but unstructured investigation can generate inconsistent interviews, unnecessary circulation of sensitive conclusions and a second evidential record that is harder to defend than the original events.

Second, preserve the evidence and resist the urge to explain too early. Relevant emails, messaging data, accounting records, board materials and access logs should be secured before they can be altered through routine deletion or informal attempts to ‘tidy up’ the file. At the same time, no employee should improvise a factual account to an investigator or regulator. Early cooperation can be valuable, but cooperation is not the same as speculation. Before the first substantive communication, counsel should know what the documents show, what remains unknown and whether the same statement could be used in criminal, regulatory, tax or civil proceedings.

Third, manage the matter as one case across several procedures or forums. A white-collar investigation rarely remains confined to one criminal file. Clients should map the exposure of the company, directors, employees and third parties; identify reporting and insurance issues; consider asset-freezing and debarment risks; and coordinate foreign counsel where data, people or assets are abroad. Decisions about self-reporting, employee interviews, disciplinary action, settlement or public statements should not be taken in isolation. The objective is not to react fastest, but to take the first step that remains defensible when every authority and court later reads the same record.

3. What are the greatest threats and opportunities in White Collar Crime law in the next 12 months?

The greatest threat is not merely stricter enforcement, but an asymmetry of integration: evidence gathering, financial intelligence and asset tracing are becoming transnational and rapid, while judicial review and defence remedies remain largely national, sequential and procedurally fragmented. From 18 August 2026, the EU e-Evidence Regulation will allow judicial authorities to issue European Production and Preservation Orders directly to service providers in other Member States. By 23 November 2026, Member States must transpose the Asset Recovery and Confiscation Directive, which strengthens asset-tracing powers and broadens the circumstances in which property may be frozen or confiscated. EPPO investigations add a further layer by combining domestic procedure, cross-border teams and EU-level priorities.

The practical consequence is that a business may have to contest the acquisition of data in one legal order, its transmission through another mechanism and its use in Greek proceedings under a third procedural framework. The formal existence of a remedy is not enough if no court examines the integrity of that chain as a whole. Data and assets may enter an investigation faster than the affected business can establish the facts, preserve privilege and coordinate its response. Counsel must therefore identify, at the outset, where and when the lawfulness, necessity and proportionality of each measure can effectively be reviewed.

A second pressure point is corporate exposure. Directive (EU) 2026/1021 on combating corruption, adopted in April 2026, requires Member States to strengthen the liability and sanctioning of legal persons, including turnover-based fines, although national transposition is not due until 2028. The EU’s new AML rulebook will become directly applicable from 10 July 2027. The direction is clear: compliance systems, internal controls and remediation will carry greater evidential and financial significance. Businesses operating in Greece should use the next twelve months to test whether their arrangements function in practice, particularly around intermediaries, procurement, beneficial ownership, conflicts of interest, gifts, payments and escalation of suspicious conduct. A written policy is evidence of design, not proof of effective implementation.

The opportunity lies in combining prevention with procedural readiness. Companies with reliable data retention, a tested incident-response plan, defensible approval processes and a clear investigation protocol can establish the facts quickly and show whether an allegation is isolated or reflects a control failure. For the defence, mutual recognition does not create an irrebuttable presumption that evidence was lawfully acquired or may be fairly used. Faster evidence gathering and wider confiscation powers remain subject to necessity, proportionality, effective judicial protection and defence rights. Those guarantees have practical value only if counsel can challenge the measure at the stages of acquisition, transmission and use, in the jurisdiction competent to provide an effective remedy.

4. How do you ensure high client satisfaction levels are maintained by your practice?

Clients in a white-collar matter measure service by whether surprises are reduced, decisions are made in time and advice remains reliable under pressure. We therefore begin by agreeing three things: the immediate objective, the next decision point and what is not yet known. Clients receive a candid assessment of legal and reputational risk, not an optimistic forecast designed to postpone a difficult conversation.

Our matters are partner-led. The client knows who is responsible, how to reach us and which member of the team owns each task. We maintain clear and detailed documentation, explain procedural developments in plain language, and provide short written recommendations where a decision has significant consequences. For international clients and foreign counsel, we distinguish carefully between what Greek law permits in theory, what the case file proves and what is realistically achievable before the competent authority or court.

Responsiveness is important, but predictability is equally important. We set reporting and cost expectations at the start, identify work that requires prior approval and update the strategy when the evidence changes. Above all, we remain personally engaged with the client. A criminal investigation affects liberty, reputation, employment, family and business continuity at the same time. Technical excellence is indispensable; trust is built by combining it with availability, discretion and the willingness to give a clear answer when the answer is unwelcome. Last, but not least, we focus on out-of-the box solution to every single problem, which is tied with inherent or systemic burdens.

5. What technological advancements are reshaping White Collar Crime law and how can clients benefit from them?

Technology is reshaping white-collar practice because the case file is no longer a file, but a distributed body of data held in email, messaging services, cloud systems, accounting platforms, access logs, mobile devices and, increasingly, crypto-asset networks. The EU e-Evidence framework will make cross-border access to certain categories of stored data faster from August 2026. For clients, preservation and response planning must therefore begin before a formal request arrives.

Forensic review tools can help counsel reconstruct chronology, trace transactions, compare accounts and isolate potentially exculpatory material far earlier than manual review alone. Targeted techniques such as deduplication, email threading and transaction mapping can also reduce the cost of large reviews. Their legal value, however, depends on the evidential architecture around them. The central question is not simply what a tool locates, but whether the material is authentic, complete, lawfully acquired, preserved without alteration and reliably attributed to the person or entity concerned.

Artificial intelligence can assist with classification, translation, issue identification and comparison of witness accounts, but it should not determine relevance, credibility or legal strategy. Any technology-assisted conclusion used to advise the client or challenge evidence should be reproducible from the source material and supported by an audit trail, human validation and appropriate confidentiality controls. Synthetic documents, altered audio and deepfakes make provenance, metadata, contextual completeness and chain of custody central issues rather than technical afterthoughts.

The greatest client benefit is not speed alone, but earlier and more reliable judgment. A company that can locate, preserve and analyse its records is better placed to respond proportionately, narrow an authority’s request, protect privileged material and assess whether an allegation is supported, mistaken or incomplete. Technology strengthens the defence only when the opposing party and the court can test the reliability of its product. Efficiency without authenticity and contestability is not an evidential advantage.

6. Describe a particularly interesting or complex matter you have advised on recently, and explain the challenges involved, your approach, and the outcome achieved for the client.

We acted for a shareholder in a cross-border dispute concerning an offshore shipholding company and alleged embezzlement and fraud by a director. The matter involved approximately USD 7 million and sat at the intersection of criminal law, corporate governance and asset recovery. It was a useful example of why a white-collar case cannot always be understood by looking at the criminal complaint alone.

The threshold issue was doctrinal as well as evidential: whether the disputed conduct crossed the boundary from a corporate or accounting controversy into an autonomous criminal wrong. Criminal law is not a substitute for enforcing shareholder expectations or correcting every failure of governance. Equally, an offshore structure or the interposition of corporate entities cannot neutralise conduct if the constituent elements of embezzlement and fraud are proved. The analysis therefore had to focus on the relevant property, the basis on which it came under the director’s control, the scope of authority over it, its subsequent treatment and the evidence bearing on intent.

Our approach was to reconstruct the matter from primary documents and to prevent legal labels from substituting for proof. Each material transaction was tested against five questions: what property was involved; to whom it belonged; how control was acquired; what authority permitted its disposition; and what evidence established its destination and subsequent treatment. We created a single chronology of corporate decisions and financial movements, separated verified facts from inference, and tested both incriminating and exculpatory explanations. The criminal and recovery strategies were coordinated so that a procedural step in one track did not undermine the evidential position in the other.

The strategy resulted in the successful pursuit of embezzlement and fraud charges and the recovery of approximately USD 7 million for the shareholder. The matter demonstrates a recurring feature of Greek white-collar practice: the decisive work lies in translating a complex corporate history into a precise criminal-law proposition while preserving a practical route to economic recovery. The required discipline is twofold – not to criminalise a failed commercial relationship, but not to allow corporate complexity to obscure conduct that satisfies the elements of an offence.