Facing the judges of the Criminal Court of Appeal will be today the founder of Folli Follie, Dimitris Koutsolioutsos, their son and wife and 10 co-defendants for the big case of inaccurate financial data that the Greek-owned multinational company had been displaying for years in order to have a good stock market image.
The trial of the so-called great Folli Follie financial scandal which has reached international dimensions is expected to start today with the two protagonists of the case, the father and the son Koutsolioutsos, being temporarily detained for the case since September 2020 and with the maximum period of their pre-trial detention due to expire next March.
The defendants, mainly executives of the company, are facing a series of felonies concerning the action criminal organisation, whose actions, according to what is alleged in the massive case file, caused damage estimated at more than EUR 400 million.
The indictment that has been drawn up for the case attributes, on a case-by-case basis, to the defendants the offences of criminal organisation, joint and repeated forgery with a total benefit and corresponding damage in excess of 120.000, fraud committed jointly and severally against natural and legal persons, NPIs and NPOs with a loss exceeding EUR 120,000, market manipulation jointly, professionally and severally and money laundering from criminal activities jointly and severally. The founder of the Group, Dimitris Koutsolioutsos, will also be tried for the felony of misuse of privileged information on a repeated and professional basis.
The countdown for the alleged large-scale deception of individuals and legal entities, both private and public, by the formerly powerful company in the jewellery sector, actually began in the first months of 2018 when a report by the US investment fund Quintessential Capital Management (QCM) was published, stating that some of FF Group's financial data may not be accurate. The allegations in the controversial QCM report triggered financial audits into the Group's operations and the judicial investigation that began in June 2018. It is worth noting that on the day the report in question was published, Folli Follie's market capitalisation on the Greek stock exchange exceeded €1 billion.
The checks revealed , according to the file, the action of a criminal organization that started in 2006 with Dimitris Koutsolioutsos as its leading figure and the Group's companies in Asia as its main lever. The defendants, executives of the Group, created a false image of a prosperous business with huge amounts of cash through fake certificates and bank data, while creating fraudulent sales records through circular transactions mainly between subsidiaries of the Group. With this last ploy in terms of the Group's turnover, the defendants, over a number of years, allegedly maintained a flawless façade, succeeding in presenting to investors an extremely robust business scheme. It is indicative that the data of the audits carried out and included in the case file revealed that 296 million euros appearing as available funds in the Asian arm in the financial year 2017, were in fact only 6 million euros. At the same time, through the consolidated balance sheets displayed by the Group and in combination with its false turnover, it achieved easy access to high levels of lending.
The position of the main defendant and founder of the company, Dimitris Koutsolioutsos, in relation to the charges against him, is that he and his family have not gained any illegal pecuniary benefit and that he has allocated all his personal money for the development of the Group.
