D. Koutsolioutsos: He defended his wife, son and partners

The stigma of the accused, for serious crimes, which led him to the bench tried to… shake off during his apology the founder of Folli Follie Dimitris Koutsolioutos, who not only defended himself, but also his son, his wife and his partners of, who will be judged by the Court in a short time.

D. Koutsolioutsos spoke of “beautifying the image” of Folli Follie and described as “unforgivable” the fact that “some went to destroy a diamond”, even expressing the belief that the company has potential even now, as long as new investors appear, which, as he estimates, will happen once the current ones leave.

At the same time, the accused also turned against the auditing companies, whose findings led the executives of Folli Follie to court, and questioned the evidence: “The auditing companies that undertook the interim management report did not go anywhere. They did nothing. Most of the evidence was from interviews. I dispute all the numbers. They had them check the whole group and they only checked the Koutsoliutsou family and the company was lost because of it. And of course we as a family panicked. I immediately resigned, while I had to sit at the helm of the company,” he said in an abhorrence of his apology.

To the questions of the president of the Three-Member Court of Criminal Appeals of Athens about each of his co-accused, D. Koutsoliutsos argued that “the accused here have nothing to do with each other”. It indirectly blamed the regional manager of the Asian subsidiary FFGS and the former CFO of the Asia subgroup, against whom there are arrest warrants. As he argued, they had the idea to increase the turnovers in the financial statements.

When it came time to talk about his family, his son George and his wife Kaiti who are on trial with him, D. Koutsolioutsos claimed that his son had taken over the group in Europe and did not deal with the group in Asia at all , while his wife had been honored with the title of vice president.