No prosecution yet in Phedonos domestic abuse case, media publishes more documents

Insufficient evidence has been gathered to prosecute suspended Paphos mayor Phedonas Phedonos in the case regarding the alleged domestic abuse of his wife, police representative Marina Christodoulidou said on Wednesday, before local media outlets published documents they claim constitute hard evidence of the alleged crimes.

“After the completion of the investigation, the file was placed before the legal service, which considered that the existing evidentiary material was not sufficient to present the case to court,” she told the Cyprus News Agency (CNA).

However, at the same time, newspaper Phileleftheros reported that the police now intend to reopen their investigation, after having taken receipt of a number of documents from news website Reporter.

Reporter had earlier in the day published what it claimed to be documents from the Nicosia general hospital’s accident and emergency unit which list injuries suffered by Phedonos’ wife Louiza Andreou as a result of domestic abuse in 2017.

Those documents appear to include Andreou’s personal details and references to a “reported beating”, as well as a “skull injury” suffered by her, while her “main symptom” according to the document is “beating by spouse”.

It also published x-ray images which it said had been taken of Andreou after the alleged incidences of domestic abuse.

Christodoulidou told CNA of these documents and images that the police have taken receipt of them, and that they will now evaluate them.

She also said that she expects a case regarding alleged rapes committed by Phedonos to be filed to the Limassol district court “in the coming days”, after it was widely reported that the legal service has issued instructions for a prosecution to proceed.

Allegations of domestic abuse against Phedonos surfaced after social media personality Ioanna Photiou, better known by her alias Annie Alexui, claimed to hold documents from the related to admissions of Andreou to the Nicosia general hospital in 2017, which stated that she had been “beaten” by Phedonos.

Andreou has vehemently denied all accusations made against her husband, writing in a post on social media that “my family is being subjected to a coordinated attack”.

“Everyone who really knows me, in my workplace, in our extended family, our friends, know that I am not a victim and that I have no fear. I have lived harmoniously with my husband for 20 years. I assure you that he is a wonderful man, decent and honest, and I am truly proud of him and the battles he is fighting,” she wrote.

The government earlier appeared keen to take Photiou’s accusations seriously, however, with Justice Minister Costas Fitiris having last month extended an olive branch in her direction, saying that there are “ways to get around” the arrest warrants put out in her name, so as to allow her to make a statement.

Photiou is currently in self-imposed exile in Russia, but Fitiris suggested that a team from the Republic of Cyprus could travel to Russia to take a statement from her, or that Photiou could make a statement through “a lawyer in Cyprus whom she trusts”.

The allegations of rape surfaced last month, when Paphos-based land developer Theodoros Aristodemou, of Aristo Developers, accused him of committing the crime around ten years ago, before giving a statement to the police.

Aristodemou has had various run-ins with Phedonos and the Paphos municipality in recent years, having been referred for trial in 2014 alongside his wife and two associates over alleged fraudulent demarcation of 177 plots of land within municipal boundaries.

It had been alleged at the time that thousands of square metres of land which had originally been designated as green space were reassigned to a development company, but the four were cleared by the Paphos criminal court the following year.

An appeal was filed against the acquittal, but the verdict was upheld by the supreme court in 2019, which found that while the paperwork contained irregularities, there had been “no deliberate attempt to secure planning permission under false pretences” on the part of Aristodemou, his wife, or his associates.