A woman who worked as a filing clerk for the Cyprus Youth Organisation (Onek), told the Nicosia district court on Monday that it wasn’t her job to check the qualifications of former staffer Yiannakis Yiannaki, who is on trial for alleged forgery.

Yiannaki, who was also the former Volunteer Commissioner has been on trial since 2022 when he pled not guilty to eight counts of forgery, having resigned from the top post a year earlier amid a media storm over both his high-school diploma and his university degree.

Prior to being appointed commissioner, he had begun his career at Onek June 1996 for a two year-term. He was made volunteer commissioner in 2013 until his resignation when the scandal broke.

Despina Georgiou, a woman who worked as a filing clerk at Onek when Yiannaki was first hired, was the only witness to testify on Monday. After her testimony, the hearing was adjourned until Friday when two new witnesses will be called.

Georgiou was quizzed both by the defence and prosecution about her receipt and handling of the documents submitted by Yiannaki.

Reading the testimony she gave to police in 2021, Georgiou said that Onek did not initially have a separate system for personnel files as in the 1990s when it was being set up, the majority of staff had been seconded from other government departments and their files were held there.

She said that outside of that, upon receipt of applications from prospective new employees or associates, the documents were not checked by her, but were handed over to another officer for evaluation.

After that, Onek’s board of directors was responsible for examining candidate applications.

However, Georgiou said that after the story broke in the media in 2021, she recalled that she had at some point asked Yiannaki to provide some documents that were missing from his file.

She explained that Yiannaki had two separate files in the Onek archive as he had two different roles in the organisation, one concerning European youth issues and the other related to activities at the youth centre.

As regards the high-school diploma presented by the media as containing evidence of falsification, she had not checked it upon receipt to determine if it had been altered.

If she had noticed such a thing, Georgiou said she would have reported it.

Neither had she come across anything that would lead her to question the US university degree that Yiannaki had presented.

She told the prosecutor on being questioned that her responsibilities only concerned the registration and filing of documents. Also, it was a long time ago, she said.

On Monday, Judge Nicole Gregoriou commented that the pace of the trial needed to be accelerated.

During the case so far, Yiannaki has been through two lawyers, with Yiannis Polychronis having walked out in November last year following a warning from judge Gregoriou about contempt of court, and his successor Thanasis Korfiotis asked to withdraw from the case earlier this year citing “ongoing disagreements” between himself and his client.