Prosecutor in Larissa urges court to reject delay bids in Tempe trial, says EU fraud case is separate

The prosecutor at the Three-member Felony Appeals Court of Larissa recommended that the court reject requests to postpone the trial for the Tempe railway disaster. The requests were filed by defence lawyers for ERGOSE executives who are also defendants in a separate case handled by the European Public Prosecutor's Office (EPPO). Both cases involve contract 717, which covered the restoration and upgrade of the signalling and remote control system on the Athens–Thessaloniki–Promachonas axis.

There is no dependency between the two case files.

The prosecutor argued that there is no identity of act because the criminal result differs: the EPPO investigation concerns financial damage to the European Union, while the Tempe case concerns the railway disaster itself. She added that the pending EPPO case does not constitute a preliminary issue for the Tempe trial. For the same reasons, she recommended rejecting as unfounded the requests and declaring the criminal prosecution inadmissible for ERGOSE defendants whose cases were archived by the EPPO investigation. The prosecutor also recommended dismissing objections to the validity of the indictment and requests to send preliminary questions to the Court of Justice of the EU, all of which were based on the EPPO case file. On matters concerning the defendants' autonomous claims and denials of the charges, the prosecutor reserved the right to address them after the evidentiary process.