Three separate complaints against deputy attorney-general Savvas Angelides were rejected by the anti-corruption authority without any public announcement.

According to news outlet INK, the complaints, forwarded to the authority by former auditor-general Odysseas Michaelides in May 2023, formed part of a batch of six lodged against Angelides.

Three followed the normal investigative process and ended with public statements exonerating him.

The remaining three were examined separately, rejected one after another, and never disclosed to the public.

Almost two years passed before any substantive response emerged, a delay so pronounced that the legal service began writing to the authority asking what had happened to the cases.

Officials there argued that complaints of such gravity, concerning a senior figure, could not be left unresolved indefinitely.

The authority claimed staffing shortages as a factor in the delay. A response to one complaint finally arrived in July last year, confirming rejection, though the authority decided an announcement was not warranted.

The first case concerned a tax matter linked to the family of former minister Socratis Hasikos, with Michaelides’ complaint focused on how Angelides had handled the issue, which was subsequently dismissed without disclosure.

The second involved a bus company case in which prosecutions were suspended, stemming from allegations over declared mileage for which the company had received state compensation, a matter that had already resulted in convictions for company executives in court.

Michaelides had raised concerns regarding how Angelides dealt with the suspended prosecutions of three drivers connected to the case, yet that complaint too was dismissed.

The third alleged a potential conflict of interest involving Angelides and three companies said to be connected to the wider surveillance affair now known as the “black van” case, with links to the Predator spyware affair in Greece.

It also pointed to changes in corporate ownership connecting companies linked to Angelides’s brother and Israeli businessman Avraam Shahak Avni.

The complaint centred on secretarial services provided to those companies, one of which was struck off the Cyprus companies register two days after Angelides issued a public statement in August 2022 rejecting the allegations against him.

It was likewise rejected by the authority without any public statement, with the authority’s terms of reference for the black van inquiry, published on July 16, concerning the arrival of the black van in Cyprus and its subsequent activity, not the conduct of Angelides, whose related complaints had by that point already been rejected.

The authority has insisted that Angelides was included within the scope of that inquiry from the outset.

It said he left a meeting at the legal service on July 29 once it became evident that his own conduct would be examined, and that a letter sent the following day by Attorney-General George Savvides, stating that everything the authority wished to investigate had already been covered.