In a rare and unusually direct intervention, Konstantinos Menoudakos — the former head of Greece’s data protection authority and a past president of the Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court — criticized the Supreme Court’s repeated decisions to shelve investigations linked to the Predator spyware affair, one of the biggest political scandals to hit Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ government.
“In this particular case, the government benefits,” Menoudakos said in an interview with Greek newspaper To Vima. “Judges are the most protected public officials. They must not do favors, even for the government.”
The comments are among the sharpest public criticisms yet from a figure at the heart of Greece’s judicial establishment. Menoudakos led the Hellenic Data Protection Authority during its investigation into the use of Predator, military-grade spyware capable of infiltrating phones and monitoring communications.
The scandal erupted in 2022 after it emerged that opposition leader Nikos Androulakis, journalists and other public figures had been targeted by spyware and, in some cases, also monitored by Greece’s national intelligence service, known as EYP. The revelations triggered a political firestorm in Athens and drew scrutiny from the European Parliament, which warned that Greece risked democratic backsliding.
Although Mitsotakis has repeatedly denied any involvement in illegal surveillance, the affair forced the resignation of his intelligence chief and the prime minister’s nephew, who served as a senior aide overseeing the intelligence services.
Menoudakos said the Supreme Court’s handling of the case had undermined confidence in the judiciary at a moment when trust in Greek institutions was already fragile.
“The Supreme Court’s repeated involvement in the investigation strengthens public distrust toward the justice system,” he said. “That distrust is also the responsibility of serving judges.”
At the center of the controversy is the decision by senior prosecutors to shelve the wiretapping case twice without pursuing a full investigation, despite mounting evidence gathered by independent authorities and lower courts. Greece’s Athens Bar Association recently called for the resignation of Supreme Court prosecutor Konstantinos Tzavellas over the decision, though Menoudakos said he opposed demands for resignations, warning they could create a “dangerous precedent.”
Instead, he argued that concerns about judicial conduct should be addressed through institutional disciplinary procedures.
The former judge also questioned how senior judicial figures are selected in Greece, suggesting that the current system fails to guarantee public confidence. Although some senior appointments are formally based on peer evaluations, critics have long argued that political influence remains deeply embedded in the judiciary.
The Predator investigation conducted under Menoudakos produced one of the most concrete findings in the entire scandal: a list of 115 confirmed spyware targets, including cabinet ministers, military officers, business executives and journalists. That material was eventually incorporated into the official case file.
According to Menoudakos, his authority managed to avoid political interference by operating in near-total secrecy for a year.
“We worked quietly, step by step, with a small and discreet team,” he said. “Nobody knew what we were doing.”
Investigators traced suspicious text messages through a network of SMS transmission companies, eventually linking them to a chain of firms associated with Predator operations in Greece. They also carried out inspections at the offices of Intellexa, the company tied to the spyware’s deployment.
By the time investigators arrived, however, the offices had effectively been emptied.
“They had stripped everything out and left,” Menoudakos recalled.
The authority later discovered that servers and equipment connected to Intellexa had been removed from a Greek data center on Dec. 16, 2021 — the same day researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab publicly exposed Predator activity in Greece.
Investigators also found promotional material suggesting Intellexa marketed surveillance services to governments and intelligence agencies.
Menoudakos said the scale and sophistication of the surveillance operation convinced him that it could not have been organized by private actors alone.
“When I saw who had been targeted, I thought this was not something a private individual could have carried out alone,” he said. “The technical experts explained to me how enormously expensive software like Predator is to operate.”
Particularly troubling, he added, was the targeting not only of political and institutional figures but also of members of their families.
The former judge suggested that prosecutors initially appeared to be making progress when they began comparing Predator targets with individuals simultaneously monitored by the Greek intelligence service. But at that point, he noted pointedly, the Supreme Court removed the case from the lower-level prosecutors in order to “upgrade” the investigation.
Menoudakos also criticized what he described as unprecedented resistance by the intelligence service to judicial oversight. Greece’s Council of State had previously ruled that Androulakis should be informed about his surveillance, but EYP refused to comply.
“In my entire career, I do not remember another case of direct refusal to comply with a ruling of a supreme court,” he said.
“There cannot be a state service in Greece that is beyond the oversight of courts and independent authorities,” he added, even in matters of national security.
For Greece’s government, the political damage from the spyware affair has eased since the peak of the crisis in 2022. Mitsotakis secured reelection in 2023 with a commanding majority, and attention has shifted toward inflation, migration and defense.
But the case has never fully disappeared. European lawmakers, press freedom groups and civil liberties organizations continue to cite the Predator scandal as evidence of weakening institutional checks and balances in Greece.
Menoudakos’ intervention is likely to revive that debate — especially because it comes not from an opposition politician or activist, but from a conservative judicial figure deeply embedded in the Greek legal establishment.
His conclusion was blunt: the evidence uncovered in lower court proceedings should have been enough to justify continuing the investigation.
“You do not need to gather new evidence in order to determine whether new evidence exists,” he said.
