Greek PM's aide guilty of harboring criminal

ATHENS, Greece (AP) -- The Greek prime minister suspended one of his aides on Tuesday after he was convicted of attempting to harbor a criminal and instigating perjury in a drug dealing case.
The conviction of Yiannis Kefaloyiannis, a former interior and public order minister who was first elected to parliament in the 1950s, was the latest in a series of embarrassments for the beleaguered conservative government.
Kefaloyiannis had been accused of telling two policemen to change their testimonies in court so that charges could be dropped against a suspected marijuana grower on Crete. Under Greek law, the charge of harboring a criminal also includes covering for a criminal.
The case occurred in late 2003, when Kefaloyiannis was still a deputy of the now-governing New Democracy party.
A Rethymno city court found him guilty late Monday of attempting to harbor a criminal and of instigating others to commit perjury, and handed him a one-year suspended prison sentence. He said he will appeal the verdict.
Arkadios Spanoudakis, the head of a local New Democracy organization in Rethymno, was also convicted as an accomplice and received a six-month suspended sentence.
Cannabis-growing is rife in Crete, with swaths of the island's remote mountains lawless areas run by heavily armed drug gangs who open fire on police helicopters or cars attempting to patrol. Several police have been injured in gunfights, and local police chiefs have come under criticism for not doing enough to tackle the problem.
Kefaloyiannis has denied all the charges.
"It was a staged trial, a conspiracy," an angry Kefaloyiannis told local reporters outside the courthouse. He accused the prosecutor of attempting to blacken his name and claimed the trial was politically motivated.
But Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis suspended him from his post until the appeal is heard.
Kefaloyiannis "will no longer exercise the duties of informal adviser to the prime minister, after the (court) verdict and until the end of the process at the appeals court," his office said in a statement.
The conviction is the latest embarrassment for Karamanlis' government, which has been beset by scandals, including allegations of financial mismanagement and unethical business deals. Earlier this month, the country's Merchant Marine minister resigned after being implicated in a scandal involving a property trade between the state and a monastery.
The governing party, which won re-election in early polls in 2007, holds just 152 of parliament's 300 seats. Two recent opinion polls showed the opposition Socialists ahead in voter preference for the first time since 2000.
http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/09/23/greece.minister.ap/index.html