The sentence was read out in a courtroom in Athens, in the flat cadence of judicial routine. Four men were convicted. The charges were precise: breach of communications confidentiality, repeated tampering with personal-data systems, unlawful access to information infrastructure. The punishment, at least on paper, was immense — 126 years and eight months in prison.
In practice, it meant eight years to be served, pending appeal.
The men in the dock — Tal Dilian, founder of Intellexa; his associate Sara Aleksandra Fayssal Hamou; and two Greek executives linked to the company, Felix Bitzios and Yiannis Lavranos — were found criminally responsible for the deployment of Predator, a powerful commercial spyware tool capable of penetrating mobile phones and silently harvesting their contents.
The ruling was described by one of the scandal’s earliest victims, investigative journalist Thanasis Koukakis, as “a good day for democracy and the rule of law”.
It was a day of reckoning. It was not a day of resolution.
Because two years earlier, Greece’s Supreme Court had cleared the national intelligence service and political officials of wrongdoing in the same affair. The state was exonerated. The vendors were convicted.
That is the architecture of Predatorgate.
The Phone That Broke the Silence
The scandal began not with a leak, but with a device.
In early 2022, Koukakis discovered that he had been placed under lawful surveillance by Greece’s intelligence service, the EYP. That revelation was troubling but not unprecedented; intelligence agencies in democratic states operate under legal interception frameworks.
The second discovery was different. Forensic analysis revealed that his phone had also been infected with Predator — not a state tool, but a commercial intrusion platform marketed by a private company operating within Greece.
Soon afterwards, Nikos Androulakis — then a Member of the European Parliament and on the cusp of leading the socialist PASOK party — disclosed that he too had been targeted.
The scandal widened quickly. According to findings by Greece’s communications privacy watchdog, Predator had reportedly been used against more than ninety individuals. Those allegedly targeted included opposition politicians, journalists, business leaders and, in some accounts, senior cabinet members and high-ranking military officers.
If that final claim is accurate, the implications extend beyond partisan conflict. Surveillance of defence leadership is not a matter of political gamesmanship; it touches the nerve centre of national security.
The fallout was immediate. The head of the intelligence service resigned. So did Grigoris Dimitriadis, a senior government aide and nephew of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Mitsotakis acknowledged that Androulakis had been lawfully monitored but denied that his government had deployed illegal spyware. He survived a motion of no confidence in parliament.
Predatorgate was never solely about technology. It was about authority — who possessed it, who supervised it, and who was accountable when its boundaries were crossed.
What the Court Did — and Did Not — Decide
The February 2026 verdict addressed specific criminal conduct. It established that members of a private network had unlawfully breached communications systems and manipulated personal data infrastructure. It confirmed that the technical apparatus of surveillance had been deployed illegally.
The court also referred aspects of the case back to prosecutors for possible further investigation, including whether more serious offences such as espionage might be examined.
What the judgment did not establish was political direction. It did not find that ministers ordered the deployment of Predator. That terrain had already been covered by the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling, which concluded there was insufficient evidence to prosecute political officials or the intelligence service.
The contrast is stark. One court found a private surveillance operation criminally liable. Another concluded that the state bore no prosecutable responsibility.
Critics of the 2024 investigation pointed to apparent limitations. Only two confirmed victims were questioned at the highest judicial level. Financial records of the company marketing the spyware were not exhaustively pursued. Employees who reportedly relocated company servers in late 2021 were not called to testify. To some observers, these omissions suggested a narrowing of scope; to others, they reflected the evidentiary limits imposed by secrecy laws and the high threshold for criminal prosecution.
From a legal standpoint, the Supreme Court’s decision rests on a fundamental principle: suspicion is not proof. Intelligence work is cloaked in classification. Courts cannot convict without demonstrable evidence.
From a democratic standpoint, however, a different standard applies — not of criminal guilt, but of political responsibility.
The Question of Ministerial Responsibility
In parliamentary systems, ministers are accountable for the agencies they oversee. That principle does not require proof that a prime minister personally authorised an unlawful act. It requires that those at the apex of government answer for the conduct of institutions under their authority.
After taking office, Mitsotakis placed the intelligence service directly under the Prime Minister’s office. When the surveillance of Androulakis became public, the government acknowledged the lawful wiretap but denied illegal spyware use. No serving minister has faced prosecution. No political figure has been convicted.
That absence is not proof of complicity. It is proof of the limits the judicial process reached.
And yet, the coexistence of two judicial findings — state exoneration and vendor conviction — produces a constitutional tension. If unlawful surveillance infrastructure operated at scale within Greek territory, and if dozens of public figures were targeted, how did that infrastructure intersect with state authority?
The February verdict answers the question of criminal deployment. It does not answer the question of oversight.
International coverage of the ruling noted the asymmetry bluntly: a scandal likened to Greece’s “Watergate” resulted in prison sentences for contractors, while government officials remained untouched. For critics, that disparity suggests that accountability stopped at the periphery. For supporters of the government, it demonstrates that allegations against ministers could not withstand legal scrutiny.
Both interpretations survive the verdict.
Surveillance and Sovereignty
One of the most unsettling elements of the scandal remains the claim that senior cabinet members and military officers were among those surveilled. If true, several possibilities arise.
The surveillance may have been authorised internally for security reasons. It may have been conducted without lawful authority by actors exploiting commercial tools. Or it may have involved an opaque overlap between official intelligence operations and privately supplied capabilities.
Each scenario carries weight.
If internally authorised, reliance on commercial spyware raises questions about the outsourcing of sovereign powers. If externally conducted, it suggests vulnerabilities in state security architecture. If hybrid, it reveals how easily lines blur when private intrusion technologies become entangled with public authority.
The court’s ruling does not resolve these possibilities. It establishes unlawful data access by named individuals. It does not illuminate the full chain of command.
A European Pattern
Predatorgate unfolded amid a broader European reckoning over spyware. From Hungary and Poland to Spain, revelations about commercial surveillance tools have exposed gaps in democratic oversight. The European Parliament launched a formal inquiry into the use of such technologies within member states.
The corporate geography of spyware is transnational. Companies operate across jurisdictions; sanctions are imposed and revised; ownership structures shift. Regulation lags behind innovation.
The appeal now before the European Court of Human Rights adds another layer. When domestic courts conclude their work and complainants turn to Strasbourg, the question becomes institutional: did the national system provide an effective remedy? That inquiry is legal, but it is also constitutional.
Predatorgate has thus moved beyond Athens. It sits within a European struggle to reconcile intelligence secrecy with democratic transparency in an age when surveillance tools are bought and sold like software licences.
The Limits of Judicial Closure
Koukakis called the verdict a good day for democracy. In one sense, he is right. Criminal courts acted. Evidence was tested. Sentences were imposed. That matters.
But the symbolism of 126 years on paper and eight years in practice captures the ambiguity of the moment. The numbers are emphatic; the outcome is measured. Appeals will proceed. Further investigations may follow.
The deeper question remains unsettled.
In contemporary democracies, surveillance power no longer resides solely within the state. It flows through private firms, procurement channels and cross-border corporate networks. When misuse occurs, responsibility disperses. Intelligence agencies invoke secrecy. Governments deny authorisation. Prosecutors pursue what can be proved. Courts rule on specific acts. Political responsibility, meanwhile, becomes harder to locate.
Predatorgate illustrates the difficulty of a system investigating itself when part of its coercive capacity has been privatised.
The Athens court has delivered its judgment. It has identified criminal actors and imposed penalties. What it has not delivered — and what perhaps no single verdict could deliver — is a comprehensive reckoning with the political structures that made the scandal possible.
In parliamentary democracies, accountability does not end with the absence of conviction. Nor does it rest solely on the punishment of contractors. It resides in the public’s confidence that power, when misused, is fully examined — not only at the edges, but at the centre.
The sentence has been delivered. The constitutional question remains.
