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Athens For months in 2012, everyone in Greece knew about the "Lagarde list," but few had actually seen it.

The list contained the names of 2,000-plus possible Greek tax evaders who held Swiss bank accounts, and was given by former French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde to her Greek counterparts in October 2010, during the worst of Greece's economic crisis.

But government officials claimed to have lost the list first by misplacing the CD it was on, then by losing the USB drive they copied it to and then dragged their heels for months.

Then, in the fall of 2012, Greek investigative journalist Kostas Vaxevanis got a copy of the list and published it in his magazine Hot Doc. He named politicians, their relevant family members, and business moguls. Suddenly, the government sprang into action. In less than 24 hours a warrant was issued and 50 police officers were deployed to arrest Mr. Vaxevanis, not the tax evaders.

"They're entering the house with a prosecutor now. They're arresting me. Spread the word," he tweeted.

Vaxevanis was ultimately acquitted of charges of "invasion of privacy" over publishing the Lagarde list. But the government's apparent efforts to stop him from digging too deeply into corruption are all too familiar to Greece's journalistic community.

Since the start of the economic crisis six years ago, journalists in Greece have come under increasing fire from government officials and the business tycoons connected to them. Without domestic laws to protect free press and free speech, journalists are left vulnerable and open to intimidation. As a result, the country has fallen steeply on the press-freedom index compiled by the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, from 31st place in 2008 to 70th in 2010 and 99th this year.

"The problem is how to create a medium that will be at the same time independent and financially sustainable, in a country in deep economic crisis," Nikolas Leontopoulos, an investigative journalist, who was fired after he refused to bury a scandal involving Greece's biggest fast-food company. "This problem is still unresolved."

The corruption that has long plagued Greece and precipitated the economic crisis continues on here, including in the media sector. A genuinely free press is difficult when the business elite control much of the coverage, analysts say.

"Practically all of the country's major television and radio stations, newspapers, and magazines, as well as major web portals, belong to a handful of extremely wealthy and well-connected media and business moguls," says Michalis Nevradakis, a Ph.D. student at the University of Texas at Austin and expert on Greek media. "[They] use their media outlets to exert pressure on the government of the day and to present an almost completely one-sided [version of] their own political point of view."

Originally posted here:
In Greece, free press pays the price for crossing the government