A Greek court has handed down what is being called the first-ever criminal conviction of commercial spyware company executives — and the fallout is heading towards Cyprus.
Intellexa founder Tal Dilian, his wife Sara Hamou, and two Greek businessmen, Felix Bitzios and Yannis Lavanos, were found guilty this week on three counts: unlawful interference with personal data systems, violation of communications secrecy, and illegal access to information systems. Judge Nikos Askianakis sentenced all four to a merged term of eight years, suspended pending appeal, from a combined total of 126 years and eight months.
Writing in Haaretz, Israeli journalist Omer Benjakob described the ruling as “the first criminal conviction of commercial spyware company executives in connection with the way their customers used the technology they provided.”
Prosecutor Dimitris Pavlidis pushed back hard against any mitigating circumstances, pointing to the scale of the operation, the recruitment of intelligence service personnel, the defendants’ clear knowledge that Predator was being used illegally, and the fact that the company kept operating in 2023 and 2024 for financial gain.
According to journalistic sources obtained by philenews from Greece, the court directly linked the espionage to the company’s relationship with Israel.
The court also decided to forward the full trial record to Greek prosecutors to investigate possible additional offences by the four defendants and other witnesses, based on information that emerged during proceedings.
The Cyprus thread
Phileleftheros has spent years documenting how the Greek scandal connects to Israeli businessmen operating in Cyprus long before it erupted in Athens.
Investigative reporting published between 2022 and 2023 linked the “black van” case directly to Dilian and his associate Abraham Shahak Avni, identified their associates in companies later scrutinised by Greek justice, and traced ties to a Cypriot political party and the police.
One of the most significant threads involves an email sent by an associate of Avni and Dilian to the office of Averof Neophytou, then president of DISY, requesting help with a software export to the Netherlands. According to official positions provided to Phileleftheros, the email — which was forwarded to the Ministry of Commerce — was examined by independent criminal investigator Ilias Stefanou, who took testimony from officials on the matter.
The wider Cyprus case has long been shadowed by questions over the role of Assistant Attorney General Savvas Angelides.
When the surveillance case reached Larnaca Criminal Court in 2021 — which fined a Dilian company — Angelides faced political criticism over the fact that he had been called upon to oversee the investigation into Avni, who had been a business partner of his brother Michalis, the two having planned to open a venture together under the name Spy Shop.
A separate complaint, revealed by Phileleftheros in May 2023, alleged that three surveillance-sector companies were receiving services from an office connected to a law firm linked to Angelides’s interests.
When contacted, Angelides said he was unaware of his brother’s activities and ruled out any possibility of having been influenced. On the question of the administrative services office, he repeated that “there is no trace of incompatibility in the context of examining the black van case.”
Political reaction
AKEL MP Aristos Damianou was blunt. Pointing to what he called the “institutional entanglement of the Anastasiades-DISY government with the companies of the former Israeli agents,” he said: “Unfortunately, when these same people and their companies found themselves before justice, some conveniently chose to suspend their criminal prosecution to let them off the hook. That is the smell of institutional entanglement and corruption.”
The Movement of Ecologists-Citizens’ Cooperation movement said the Greek verdict “inevitably brings back the discussion about the black van case in Cyprus and confirms why, from the very beginning, we insisted this was not a ‘misunderstood incident’ but a matter touching the core of rights, privacy and the quality of democracy.”
The Independent Authority against Corruption is currently evaluating complaints it has received covering the full scope of the Cyprus black van scandal.