Newsroom
Cyprus’ anti-corruption authority has ended its inquiry into the “spy van” affair after the Legal Service told it that everything it wanted to examine had already been investigated.
The decision, announced Monday, means the authority will not carry out the wider investigation it had planned. It has made no finding in its announcement on the allegations themselves.
The case began with a complaint submitted in 2023 by the Audit Service and signed by then Auditor General Odysseas Michaelides. Since then, developments in Cyprus, Greece and European institutions prompted the authority to broaden its planned inquiry on its own initiative. It said it intended to look at all incidents connected to the spy van affair, without exception.
But before starting, it notified the attorney general under an arrangement the two offices made in 2022 to avoid overlapping investigations. Letters and a lengthy meeting followed. The Legal Service’s position, according to the authority, was that the matters it proposed to investigate had already been examined by the competent authorities.
The authority says that, under the law governing its work, it cannot investigate those matters again. It has therefore closed its inquiry.
For anyone who has followed the case, the distinction matters: the watchdog is not saying it investigated the full affair and found nothing wrong. It is saying it wanted to investigate but could not proceed because of the Legal Service’s position.
The public will not get much more detail about how that conclusion was reached. The authority says the attorney general classified their correspondence as confidential, preventing it from explaining the exchanges. It released part of its account because of the case’s public interest but said it would provide no further information or comment.
The spy van affair has raised questions for years about surveillance and how the case was handled. Monday’s announcement settles what the anti-corruption authority will do next. It leaves readers with a harder question: which parts of the affair were investigated, and what did those investigations establish?
