Former Greek minister "evaded taxes" The former finance minister who steered Greece into the eurozone in 2000 faces possible charges of tax evasion involving his wife's Swiss bank account following an investigation carried out by the Greek financial police at the request of an Athens anti-corruption prosecutor. The prosecutor's office said yesterday that Yannos Papantoniou and his wife Roula Kourakou failed to pay about €3m of taxes due between 2000 and 2010. "Charges may be pressed after all procedures are completed by the relevant tax office (handling the couple's tax affairs)," it said. Ms Kourakou's €1.3m account appeared on a leaked database dating from 2007 that recorded more than 2,000 deposits held by Greeks at HSBC's Geneva branch. A copy of the database - known as the "Lagarde list" after the former French finance minister, now managing director of the International Monetary Fund - was provided to Athens by French authorities shortly after Greece's international bailout got under way in 2010. Of the many prominent Greeks caught up in the affair, Mr Papantoniou is the first whose legal case has now become public. He has denied wrongdoing. One person familiar with the matter said he repatriated funds held in the HSBC account to Athens in 2010 and paid tax of 5 per cent on the full amount under an amnesty law enacted to attract foreign deposits back to Greece. The same person said the Papantoniou couple were disputing the prosecutor's findings and expected the matter to be settled by the tax authorities and the administrative courts. Greek authorities began investigating the Lagarde list this year on instructions from Yiannis Stournaras, the finance minister. The French government handed over a second copy after his two predecessors in the job claimed to have "mislaid" it. The list, which includes politicians and prominent businesspeople believed to have moved tens of millions of euros through their HSBC accounts, has become a symbol of the reluctance of successive Greek administrations to crack down on tax evasion by the country's wealthy elite, despite pressure by international lenders and the leftwing opposition party Syriza. Critics of the government say a decision to make Greek tax offices - where account-holders are registered responsible for investigating them - rather than appoint a special task force, suggests few of the alleged tax evaders would face prosecution. "The tax offices lack the capacity to carry out this job within the two-year timeframe set by the government, so it's highly unlikely that anyone on the list will be sent for trial," said Costas Vaxevanis, editor of Hot Doc, an investigative magazine that published the Lagarde list a year ago.