The legal service on Friday confirmed that it had filed an appeal against the sentence handed down to former volunteer commissioner Yiannakis Yiannaki, who pled guilty to three charges related to the circulation of forged documents and the knowledge that they were forged when doing so.

Competent sources from inside the legal service explained to the Cyprus Mail that the appeal had been filed so as to guard against Yiannaki’s own appeal against his sentence.

Yiannaki had appealed against his sentence – two consecutive 18-month sentences, amounting to three years in total – arguing that he should instead serve the two sentences concurrently, and thus only spend 18 months behind bars.

“If his appeal is accepted, he will only serve 18 months in prison, and the legal service’s position is that that is not an adequate sentence for the crimes to which he pled guilty,” the sources explained.

As such, they said, the appeal had been filed to be heard effectively in case Yiannaki’s appeal is successful, so as to raise the amount of time to be served back towards the initially handed down three years.

“Given that 18 months is not adequate, if it were to be found that he would serve the sentences concurrently, we would seek to raise the length of those sentences to bring the total sentence back to the region of the three years initially handed down, which the legal service deems more appropriate,” the sources said.

They added that if Yiannaki’s appeal is dismissed, the legal service will likely drop its own appeal.

Accusations regarding the veracity of Yiannaki’s high school diploma and university degree came to light in 2021, and he resigned from his role as volunteer commissioner amid a media storm.

The case had drawn intense social media scrutiny, with pictures of crudely doctored documents doing the rounds.

In 2022, then police spokesman Christos Andreou had said that the San Diego State University, the university in the United States at which Yiannaki had claimed to have studied, said it had no knowledge of or ever even heard of him.

A picture of his university degree, a bachelor’s in civil engineering issued in 1992, had circulated, with the certificate bearing the signatures of four officials, one of whom is Edmund Gerald Brown Jr, cited as California governor.

However, Brown was not California governor in 1992, having served between 1975 and 1983 and then between 2011 and 2019. In 1992, Brown was putting together a run for the United States’ presidency, but came second in the Democratic party’s primary race to then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.

Apparent tampering with Yiannaki’s high school diploma and his university degree, was discovered by the auditor-general of the day Odysseas Michaelides after he received an anonymous complaint about the issue.

Yiannaki changed lawyers twice during the case, with Yiannis Polychronis having walked out in November last year following a warning from judge Nicole Gregoriou about contempt of court, and his successor Thanasis Korfiotis having asked to withdraw from the case citing “ongoing disagreements” between himself and his client.