The police on Wednesday confirmed that it had handed to the legal service the file documenting its investigation into the history of faulty airbags in Cyprus and their import into the country.
Its submission to the legal service comes 15 months after a report conducted into the matter by an ad hoc committee recommended that criminal charges be brought against three people, with attorney-general George Savvides taking receipt of that report in July last year and handing it on to both the police and cabinet.
Now, it is expected that Savvides will study the police’s file and decide whether to proceed with prosecutions. It is also possible that he will request the police to conduct further investigations.
The ad hoc committee had comprised its chairman, former Supreme Court judge Michalakis Christodoulou, as well as bar association chairman Michael Vorkas and audit office member Theodosios Hadjimichail.
Its report wrote that the four people who served as transport minister between 2013 and 2023 “bear heavy responsibility” for the issue of faulty airbags and their permeation into the Cypriot market, with those four ministers having been Efthymios Flourentzou, Marios Demetriades, Vasiliki Anastasiadou, and incumbent Famagusta district governor Yiannis Karousos.
The report wrote that none of the four “acknowledged or took responsibility”, which the committee would have expected of them given their roles and that this absolution of responsibility had been done “under the pretext that no one informed them about the problem with the Takata airbags and the way in which the road transport department dealt with the problem”.
“If they knew about it, they would have brought it up, and they would have certainly dealt with it, as has been proven by the fact that they also faced other issues during their terms in office as ministers,” the report stated, though it expressed its disagreement with this position.
“A minister does not need to have direct and personal involvement in an issue for it to be attributed to them,” it said. “If the people at the top of the political and social pyramid do not take responsibility for their actions, they are encouraging the consolidation of general and political impunity.”
Former ministers responsible for ‘inaction, negligence, indifference’
It said the former ministers bear responsibility for “the inaction, negligence, and indifference shown by the road transport department”.
Later, it said that Karousos’ successor Alexis Vafeades, who served in post between 2023 and August this year, had “become involved in solving the problem” in 2023 “due to information he had been given” by the father of Kyriakos Oxinos, who had been killed in an incident involving a faulty airbag that year.
Vafeades, the report said, had not been informed “by the competent authorities or by the ministry’s permanent secretary, who should have duly informed him”.
Upon submitting the report last July, Christodoulou said that Savvides “is responsible for whether to adopt the recommendations, and the courts are the final judge”.
He said the committee had found “a possibility of there having been an abuse of power, a homicide, causing death due to a reckless act, and serious injury”.
The potential criminal charges also relate to the cases involving Alexandros Lougos, who suffered life-altering injuries as a result of a faulty airbag in 2017, and of Styliani Giorgalli and Oxinos, who were both killed in accidents involving faulty airbags.
The issue of airbags stems from the production of faulty airbags by Japanese company Takata. The company’s airbags suffer a fault related to exposure to high levels of heat or humidity, which means they have a tendency to explode when released under such circumstances.
This explosion shoots the airbag’s metal inflator outwards and in the direction of the person it was designed to protect, potentially causing further injuries or, in some cases, death.