The right to a fair trial of two Cypriots jailed for their part in the so-called Dromolaxia scandal, a dodgy land deal that came under investigation in 2013, was not violated, the European Court of Human Rights ruled on Tuesday.

In Souroullas Kay and Venizelos Zanettos v. Cyprus filed in 2018, the court said the two defendants had also been given the right to adequate time and facilities for preparation of defence. They had claimed their rights were violated on both counts.

The scandal revolved around the purchase by Cyta’s pension fund of office space in Dromolaxia, near Larnaca airport, at a price several times the going market value.

The land was initially sold to a company by the name of Wadnic Trading, which upgraded the building coefficients, built on it and sold it on to the Cyta pension fund for some €20 million.

Five people were jailed in total in subsequent trials, including Kay and Zanettos.

In January 2015 Kay, a land registry official, was convicted for money laundering, and Zanettos for extortion in connection with the land deal. The former was sentenced to six-and-a-half years in jail, the latter to three-and-a-half years.

Zanettos was financial director of the Akel party at the time.

A key part of the evidence had been the testimony of businessman Nicos Lillis, a property entrepreneur and owner of Alki Larnaca, a football club associated with Akel.

Lillis had been given immunity from prosecution after he had given statements implicating, among others, the applicants – Kay and Zanettos.

“The court found in particular that the trial had not been compromised by the inclusion of N.L.’s [Nicos Lillis] evidence as the national courts had been cautious in treating that evidence, and there had been other corroboration available too,” the ECHR said in its ruling.

“As regards the applicants’ demand to examine the prosecution’s copy of N.L’s hard disks to prove collusion, the court was satisfied that the national courts had heard the argument on the matter and had denied the request with reasoned decisions. The applicants’ arguments in this connection were entirely hypothetical,” the judgment read.

Lillis had testified that Kay had laundered bribes for a CyTA trade union representative, and that Zanettos had threatened to block the deal unless Lillis paid off personal loans taken out by former executives of Alki FC to shore up the club’s finances.

“The applicants complain in particular of their convictions being based solely on the testimony of an accomplice who had been granted immunity, and of lack of access to data regarding the prosecution’s hard disks to establish collusion between the prosecution and N.L.”

In 2013 an inquiry was set up into a suspicious land deal in Dromolaxia. The authorities suspected that the original owner, a Turkish Cypriot, had had no right to sell the land, and worried that the pension fund of CyTA, a state-owned telecommunications provider, had made a bad investment.

A police investigation followed, leading to a search of the offices of the private company that had bought the land and the home of its director, Lillis. Police seized computer hard drives during the searches. Lillis was charged with bribery in early September 2013.

He subsequently contacted investigators and stated he would cooperate and be a prosecution witness. In the following two months he made four written statements to the effect that bribes had been given as part of a conspiracy to sell the land to CyTA’s pension fund at an inflated price.

He admitted his own guilt, implicated seven other people and one company, and stated that Kay had laundered bribe money paid to a representative of the CyTA trade union. He also stated that Zanettos had threatened to block the deal unless Lillis paid off loans of former Alki executives.

In their application to the ECHR, Kay and Zanettos alleged Lilllis had cut a deal with prosecutors during the criminal trial in Cyprus. This, they claimed, tainted the evidence given by Lillis as the prosecution witness. The ECHR dismissed the argument, noting that the Cypriot courts had considered this claim and rejected it.