Nicosia district court on Thursday sentenced former volunteerism commissioner Yiannakis Yiannaki to three years in prison for deliberately circulating forged documents to secure a job in the public sector.

During her reading of Yiannaki’s sentence, Nicosia district court judge Nicole Gregoriou underscored that the forgeries were not to be dismissed as trivial, highlighting the aggravating factor that Yiannaki had received a salary based on his falsified qualifications for three decades.

In this way, she said, he had benefited not only financially for many years, but had also secured the position at the expense of other applicants.

While highlighting that throughout his career, Yiannaki had carried out his duties “flawlessly” and taking into consideration that he had no prior criminal record, Gregoriou said that the case raised broader concern and stressed the need for prevention.

“This is not a case of a man who made a frivolous mistake 30 years ago. The defendant acted with premeditation and, exploiting the fruits of his illegal actions, followed a downward trajectory of decades, which was based on fake degrees and certificates,” she said.

Gregoriou rejected the request of Yiannakis’ lawyers to suspend the sentence, emphasising the severity of the case and saying that it must be considered far more than a trivial mistake.

“There is no justification for a suspension of the sentences imposed on the defendant,” she said, adding that “this would render the committed crimes meaningless and send the message that fraud and undeserved favouritism would remain unpunished if not made public in a timely manner.”

She requested the immediate execution of the sentence and criticised the authorities for their “long-standing inability to detect the fraud”, stressing that the case revealed “a morbidity” in the state’s control mechanisms.

The former volunteerism commissioner was ultimately sentenced to 36 months in prison – 18 months to be served consecutively for each two of the charges, plus another 18 months but served concurrently for the third charge.

Yiannaki had earlier pleaded guilty to three of eight charges: circulating a forged high-school diploma, a San Diego State University degree and a letter of recommendation.

He did not plead guilty to the charge of having forged the documents himself; and during the course of the trial, prosecutors dropped this charge.

He had submitted the fake documents when applying to the Youth Board (Onek), a semi-governmental body, in 1995 and began work there in 1996.

In 2013, Yiannaki took over the position as the government’s volunteerism commissioner, from which he resigned in 2021, after the forgery affair first came to light.

Despite being suspended from Onek in 2022, he continued to receive half his salary – about €1,100 a month – because the board feared legal action if it cut pay entirely.

During a discussion at the parliamentary education committee in February 2025, Akel MP Christos Christofides said that that, by the summer of 2025, the Cyprus government will have paid a total of €76,800 in salaries to Yiannaki despite his suspension.

Yiannaki was briefly arrested in March 2025 after failing to appear for an earlier hearing.

Thursday’s ruling closes court proceedings that began in May 2022, when the attorney-general filed the initial forgery and document-circulation charges.