Key Points:
- Cypriot authorities took 13 years to execute a European Arrest Warrant against Christos Christodoulides, a Cypriot lawyer convicted of immigration fraud.
- In 2022 Christodoulides began serving the sentence under house arrest, but continued to practice law.
- The Cyprus Bar Association’s Disciplinary Board in 2021 rejected a 2009 complaint about Christodoulides having a law license, but is now investigating him for “shameful and unethical behavior.”
- The judges who sentenced Christodoulides in separate immigration fraud cases in Cyprus repeatedly cited his “clean criminal record.”
A Cypriot law firm is continuing to provide a full range of legal services, including in immigration law, despite its owner’s long history of immigration fraud cases, both in the United Kingdom and Cyprus.
In fact, Nicosia-based ChrisLaw Advocate & Legal Consultants, established by solicitor Christos Polykarpou Christodoulides in 2008 after he fled a UK prison, has plans to expand to Larnaca and Limassol.
Court decisions and other legal documents obtained by the Cyprus Investigative Reporting Network (CIReN) and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) reveal that Christodoulides has been convicted for crimes related to immigration fraud three times –– though one conviction was dismissed on appeal –– and had an outstanding arrest warrant for over a decade. The case has raised systemic questions about the criminal justice system in Cyprus, a hotspot of human trafficking.
Until recently, Cypriot authorities appear to have turned a blind eye to the solicitor’s colorful record. And the Cyprus Bar Association has allowed him to practice law uninterrupted, though earlier this month filed an official disciplinary action against Christodoulides for doing so while imprisoned.
The Association’s Disciplinary Committee accused the lawyer of “disgraceful or incompatible with the legal profession behavior,” which could cost him his law license.
Christodoulides declined to comment on the record, but insisted that all past claims against him have now been settled.
Political Scandal
In 2005, then 38-year-old UK solicitor Christakis Christodoulides (the name he used in UK) admitted to offenses related to immigration fraud, and was sentenced by a UK criminal court to nine years in prison. On appeal, the sentence was reduced to seven and a half years.
But Christodoulides surfaced in Cyprus in 2008, where he established a law firm and renewed a prior law license with the Cyprus Bar Association. The following year, the UK issued a European Arrest Warrant requesting his extradition.
The 2009 warrant outlined the role of Christodoulides in the immigration case that shook the British government. Between 2001 and 2004, Christodoulides forged documents on at least 600 visa applications, for people wanting to emigrate from Romania to the U.K, the document states. At the time, the UK was part of the EU, but Romania wasn’t and its citizens required visas. The forged paperwork was for a visa program that allowed non-EU nationals to start businesses in the UK
After a diplomat blew the whistle, the scam caused public outrage, and Britain’s Minister of State for Immigration, Citizenship and Counter Terrorism, Beverley Hughes, was forced to resign. Hughes had reportedly been warned that the Home Office was approving fraudulent visas.
The UK judge took particular offense to the fact that Christodoulides had committed the crimes while acting as a lawyer. “A solicitor of the Supreme Court as you know is an officer of the Court and it is quite appalling that you should have behaved as you did over this considerable period of time,” said the judge. He was debarred as a solicitor in the UK
Christodoulides served just three years before walking out of Spring Hill Prison in Buckinghamshire, a community northwest of London. According to the document, he had been granted a day pass on May 4, 2008, but did not return as required by 6:30 pm that evening. “A check of his room showed that he had taken his belongings,” says the warrant. “He never returned to HMP Springfield and thereafter left the jurisdiction and travelled to the Republic of Cyprus.”
Christodoulides had also been ordered to pay £650,000 (€953,550) for failing to pay a confiscation order, or spend an additional three years in prison. That sentence would have been added to his criminal conviction.
Documents obtained by CIReN show that Christodoulides was finally ordered to serve the UK sentence in Cyprus in 2022, which lasted just 15 months and one week under house arrest, before he was paroled, in part, for having “no criminal record.”
Justice Delayed
According to leaked emails and documents obtained by OCCRP, the UK’s attempts to extradite Christodoulides continued for years. The correspondence shows that a Cypriot judge rejected the UK request in 2010, because Cyprus had a law against extraditing its own citizens. Christodoulides was born in the UK but holds a Cypriot passport.
The UK repeated the request in 2014, after a constitutional amendment allowed for extraditions from Cyprus. No specific action of the Cyprus government is known until October 2017, when according to the leaked documents, the Office of the Attorney General listed Christodoulides’ European Arrest Warrant under the category “to be executed urgently.”
Questions to the Attorney General about why the task was not carried out went unanswered. A spokesperson referred CIReN to the Ministry of Justice and the Cypriot police, neither of which responded to questions.
Documents obtained by reporters show that Christodoulides began serving a 3 year 12 day sentence in Cyprus in November 2022. Upon agreement between the Medical Council and the Attorney General the sentence was to be served from home.
According to a letter from the Deputy Director of Prisons to the Attorney General, the 12 days were related to the UK criminal conviction, and the three years for the unpaid confiscation order. The letter, signed by Ioannis Kapnoulas, raised questions about Christodoulides’ ability to continue practicing law while serving a sentence.
Documents show that the following month, a parole board reduced Christodoulides’ sentence further, resulting in parole in March of this year, after just 15 months and one week. The parole board cited “no previous convictions,” the fact that “offenses for which he has been convicted date back to 2005,” that he was “serving a term of imprisonment basically for civil debts,” and that he was facing “very serious health problems.” His release on parole also included a provision that “he will continue work as a freelance lawyer from his office in Nicosia.”
The following day, Christodoulides posted on Facebook announcing that he planned to expand his practice to Limassol and Larnaca.
The Cyprus Bar Association told CIReN in May that it was investigating Christodoulides.
This month, according to documents obtained by CIReN, the Bar Association’s Disciplinary Committee accused the lawyer of behavior “inconsistent with the status of an officer of justice,” and summoned him to a hearing in November, where his license will be at stake.
Christodoulides is accused of holding a law license while serving a prison sentence under house arrest. Moreover, the Bar Association alleges he renewed his 2023 license “without disclosing or while concealing” this information from them.
The penalties may include disbarment, suspension of his license, a fine, a warning, or a reprimand.
According to another document obtained by CIReN, this is not the first time Christodoulides was on the Bar Association’s radar. Minutes from a 2021 disciplinary board hearing show that the disciplinary board accepted the lawyer’s argument, that at the time of his prosecution and conviction by an English court, he did not hold a Cypriot law license.
Christodoulides was licensed in Cyprus from 1994 and 2000, and had the license renewed in 2009 or 2010, according to the document. The technicality convinced the board to dismiss the complaint that was filed by the immigration non-governmental organization, KISA, in 2009.
“Clean Criminal Record”
But Christodoulides also got in trouble with the law while he held a Cypriot law license.
In 2013, the Cyprus Nicosia District court convicted Christodoulides for selling fake German visas to clients trying to avoid deportation from Cyprus. He and his associate “conducted this illegal activity systematically and obtained a large monetary benefit from foreigners,” according to the court verdict.
Specifically, Christodoulides “as a lawyer committed these offenses repeatedly and without hesitation and respect for the profession he practiced,” the judge ruled in the verdict, adding that he “deliberately misled the authorities with false and contradictory evidence.”
Christodoulides was found guilty on eight charges, but received just 5 months in jail. The judge justified the relatively short sentence, describing Christodoulides as “intelligent and educated”, noting that he had suffered from a disability – a reference to a missing arm – and highlighting his “clean criminal record.”
Christodoulides’ license was suspended for three years, but the Cyprus Bar Association allowed him to work as a consultant for other law offices.
In 2018, the Nicosia Criminal Court found Christodoulides to be the brains behind a ring of human traffickers.
Romanian women were trafficked to Cyprus, where they were forced into “sham marriages” to help immigrants stay in the European Union, according to the verdict. “While they came with dreams and goals for a better future for themselves and their families, they finally found themselves completely unexpectedly facing a nightmare of deception, exploitation, intimidation,” the verdict stated.
The women were each in “a dire financial situation” and were “lured” to Cyprus with the promise of work. Instead, their identity documents were taken away upon arrival, and they were locked up in apartments and threatened, according to case documents. When one woman protested, “she was confronted with the use of violence, which caused panic and terror in the girls.” Fortunately, some of these women “reacted and managed to mobilize their relatives who alerted the police who found them in the apartment”.
Christodoulides was accused of initiating the scheme and convicted of conspiracy to defraud Cypriot and EU authorities. He was initially sentenced to serve eight months in jail, with the judge again citing a “clean criminal record” and “no previous convictions”.
The conviction was dismissed upon appeal to the Supreme Court in 2020.
The court deemed that the main evidence for Christodoulides’ involvement came from the testimony of another defendant, and that without it there’s no proof of his involvement.
In fact, convictions against multiple defendants in the case were overturned in 2020, citing the lack of a clear definition of “sham marriages” in the Cypriot law at the time.
“It is not enough for a marriage to be a sham if it was performed for the sole purpose of a foreigner to secure his/her stay in Cyprus. The marriage must be performed for the sole purpose of the foreigner’s (both reasons) entry and stay in the Republic,” the judge stated. The three Pakistani men involved in the case were already in Cyprus.
The law was changed after the charges were filed, clarifying that either entry or stay would constitute a violation.
A 2020 Eurojust study into national legislation on sham marriages noted that “organized crime groups make big profits through arranging sham marriages,” though they “often appear as isolated acts, connected only to relatively minor offenses, such as document fraud or administrative violations, associated with low penalties.”
Prosecuting such cases in Cyprus is challenging, noted Rita Superman, a DISY MP and the former head of the Cyprus Police’s Office of Combating Trafficking in Human Beings.
Superman described the 2018 case as difficult.
“At the time, we fought the legal service because many simply didn’t know what human trafficking is,” she said, speaking generally about human trafficking cases. “Maybe our judges don’t recognise the real problem. Maybe they lack expertise. Maybe they fear for their lives because they’re dealing with organized crime.”
The latest US State Department report into human trafficking in Cyprus concluded that “although the government meets the minimum standards, it investigated and prosecuted fewer trafficking crimes compared with the prior year” and that Cypriot judges “issued most traffickers suspended sentences.”