“I’m totally innocent of the charges, it’s a total stitch-up,” he said.
“I’ll make further comments later on.”
Alex was escorted by his sister into a waiting black Range Rover driven by another woman before disappearing into the night.
The controversial building industry figure was arrested last month over a $17 million tax fraud syndicate. Alex was arrested in Queensland and extradited to Sydney on conspiracy to defraud the Commonwealth and dealing with proceeds of crime charges.
George Alex allegedly ran a multimillion-dollar money laundering operation. Picture: John Grainger
Magistrate Margaret Quinn imposed a raft of strict bail conditions on Alex including effective house arrest, which she said would mitigate any flight risk he posed.
Mr Alex was alleged to be the leader of the syndicate that used labour hire and payroll companies to defraud the ATO. Millions of dollars were then allegedly transferred to Australian accounts controlled by other accused syndicate members.
Ms Quinn ordered Alex to report twice daily to Marrickville police station and otherwise not leave his aunt’s Earlwood home, while also banning him from leaving NSW.
“And his mother says she’s prepared to supervise him,” the magistrate said.
“If he is foolish enough to talk to (his co-accused) he should be aware that his bail will be revoked.”
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis reiterated his promise to citizens that, should the vaccine pass stage four trials, it will arrive in Greece at the end of 2020.
Health Minister Vassilis Kikilias came under fire yesterday for guaranteeing an ‘impossible promise’, yet the Greek PM has backed the health minister’s observations on the scheduled date for the vaccine in Greece and other EU states.
“Greece participates in the agreement for the pre-emption of the vaccine against the coronavirus and will receive it share according to the agreement between EU and the pharmaceutical company Astra Zeneca if the under development vaccine passes successfully the necessary trials,” the Prime Minister said on Wednesday.
Health Minister Vassilis Kikilias. Photo: Supplied
“The best scenario is the vaccine to arrive in Greece at the end of 2020,” Mitsotakis added.
While the Greek leaders optimism was received well by citizens, a spokeswoman of the European Commission put the breaks on their celebrations, saying “we cannot give an exact date for the vaccines.”
Spokesperson Vivian Loonela was responding to a relevant question by a Greek correspondent in Brussels.
“The EU strategy is to have the vaccines as soon as possible, but also with the biggest possible security,” she added.
An opposition party member for SYRIZA accused Minister Kikilias of making false claims saying that “he announced the purchase of a vaccine that does not exist yet.”
The left-wing opposition also accused the government of “playing with the public anxiety” through “cheap government-generated populism that is both unacceptable and dangerous.”
An emergency doctor in Melbourne says he feels lucky to be alive after spending days on a ventilator in intensive care with coronavirus.
In July, Australian news outlets reported a young doctor in his 30s was in ICU, but his identity has not been revealed until now. In an exclusive interview on The ABC with 7:30, Yianni Efstathiadis, 34, retells his dramatic ordeal.
Dr Efstathiadis began experiencing minor COVID-19 symptoms and went to get tested for virus. It came back negative.
The young doctor then had a second test a few days later, which came back positive. Once the positive result came through, him and his wife, Brit Green, went into isolation.
Brit Green and Yianni Efstathiadis both work at Northern Hospital Epping. (ABC/Supplied: Yianni Efstathiadis)
“About five days later, I was getting really sick and very, very lethargic and couldn’t really look after myself at all, coughing a lot,” Dr Efstathiadis told 7.30.
Dr Green, who has not contracted COVID-19, was keeping in contact with him via regular video calls. When he told her he felt dizzy, could not get off the couch or keep any fluids down, she called an ambulance. While he was in hospital, his oxygen levels were found to be low.
“That was the point, as a doctor, I started getting worried,” Dr Efstathiadis said.
He was transferred to intensive care and had a tube inserted to help him breathe.
“Even though I’ve seen that sort of stuff being done before, and I’ve actually put in tubes before as well, being on the patient’s side it was just, for me, it was panic and fear,” he said.
Yianni Efstathiadis in hospital with COVID-19.(ABC/Supplied: Yianni Efstathiadis)
“I know all those stats about a certain decent percentage of people that end up in ICU with COVID don’t leave. So as I was going towards ICU to get intubated, that was probably the most scary thing.”
Dr Green woke up to find a message saying her husband had low oxygen and was being taken to ICU.
“I had to tell our family, because all of a sudden I was the next of kin. I just didn’t really anticipate that I would be making decisions for my 34-year-old husband about treatment,” she said.
“I was pretty scared that I might not see Yianni ever again. Every day I woke up and I was scared. Every day.”
ICU director at Northern Hospital Epping and friend of Yianni, Dr Anthony Cross, told the ABC that having a colleague in ICU with coronavirus “brings it all home, becomes very personal, because this could be any of us”.
As he was recovering, Dr Efstathiadis recognised how lucky he had been to have made it through.
While there is no way to find out exactly how he contracted the virus, the doctor says it was most likely from one of the positive patients he had treated.
Dr Cross said Dr Efstathiadis’s experience served as a stark warning.
“This is a serious disease and it’s there and it could potentially kill you,” he said.
“Yianni is a young guy. Yianni is a guy who knows about infection prevention and yet not only did he get this disease but he got very sick with it.”
Cousins Dezi Madafferi, 41, and Penny Kerasiotis, 33, are seriously superstitious and serious about Greek food. Something which makes them the perfect duo to represent Team Greece in Channel 7’s new show Plate of Origin, which airs on Sunday, August 30 at 7pm.
The show has been touted as the ‘World Cup of Cooking.’ Ten teams from across Australia, representing some of the greatest food nations, will cook from their heart and heritage to determine which cuisine will ultimately reign supreme.
For Dezi and Penny, the decision to enter such a high-pressure environment and represent their Greek roots was simple and ‘inevitable.’
“Could they really have had a cooking show without a Greek team?!” Dezi says with a laugh as we sit down for our exclusive chat.
Cousins Dezi and Penny will represent Team Greece in the first season of Channel 7’s new show, Plate of Origin. Photo Supplied.
“When I saw Plate of Origin I thought, ‘yes this is a fantastic opportunity.’ And as a team, there is no one else I would rather do it with than Penny because desserts are not my strength and she’s amazing at them. So I asked her and we went for it.”
Although Penny cheekily adds, “You didn’t really ask me, you told me,” there’s no doubt that she actually is an afficionado on Greek desserts. She runs her own cake shop, Miss Penny Cakes, in Brunswick West, Melbourne, and was only five years old when her yiayia taught her how to make filo pastry from scratch.
“I spent a lot of time with my yiayia growing up, so my life was always around food. My yiayia’s goal in life was to make sure we ate something every five minutes and if we didn’t, we must have been sick,” Penny tells The Greek Herald.
“But I’m not a qualified pastry chef. I’ve just learnt by myself through trial and error, and whatever I put my mind to, I just do it.”
Dezi on the other hand, prefers to work with seafood as her father was a fishmonger and her first job was with her parents at the fish markets. But still, it wasn’t really until she married at the age of 23 to a ‘xeno,’ as she describes it, that she really gave Greek home cooking a try.
“I mean I’ve always loved Greek food. I love eating. We’re Greek, it’s in our blood. But I actually physically started cooking when I got married,” Dezi explains.
“I would watch great cooks like my mum in the kitchen. She doesn’t measure a thing. It’s all done “me to mati,” with the eye and the feel. So I’m always frantically trying to take notes and watch her so I can recreate them at home. She taught me a lot.”
Dezi and Penny look like the team to beat in the first season of Plate of Origin. Photo supplied.
With all their Greek sweet and savoury bases covered, they’re set to be one of the teams to beat in the first season of Plate of Origin. All that’s left for them to do is impress the show’s judges, Manu Feldel, Matt Preston and Gary Mehigan, with their ‘simple, strong flavours’ and win the $100,000 in prize money.
“I never thought in my wildest dreams that Manu, Matt and Gary would ever be tasting my home cooking. So for me, it was a dream come true that they would even taste it. I got a real buzz out of that,” Dezi says.
“At the end of the day, we just want to show everybody that Greek food is plentiful, tasty and from the heart. It can be simple cooking that you don’t need to be a master chef to be able to cook. You just need to get the balance right.”
Plate of Origin airs on Channel 7, August 30 at 7pm.
On Monday, Justice Phillip Priest ruled that Henry Hammond was not guilty of Courtney (Konstandina) Herron’s murder due to mental impairment.
Her mother, Maxie Antoniou, has told The Age that the verdict felt like a punch in the guts as she tries to keep things together for her family, including her elderly mother and two children.
“I hate the fact I’ve got the life sentence,” Maxie says. “I’ve been fighting for justice for so long.”
Courtney was 25 when she was fatally assaulted in Melbourne’s Royal Park by Hammond, a homeless man she had given a cigarette to on the afternoon of May 24 last year.
CONTENT WARNING: Readers may find the contents of this report distressing.
The pair went to dinner at a Fitzroy restaurant together, where security cameras captured them in friendly conversation, before Courtney paid for Hammond’s meal and they went to a friend’s apartment and smoked cannabis and ice.
SES personnel conducted a line search in Royal Park after Courtney’s body was discovered. Photo: AAP: James Ross.
In the early hours of May 25, the pair left the apartment and entered the sprawling park at about 4.30am.
Hammond picked up a branch and Courtney became scared. Hammond would later tell police her last words were: “Are you going to kill me?”
A witness sleeping in the park said the frenzied attack lasted 50 minutes. He described hearing a woman’s screams and her attacker going “hell for leather.”
Hammond then tied Courtney’s legs together and dragged her body into a clearing where he covered her with branches, before taking her phone and wallet.
These are details that will haunt her mother forever.
“The fact she turned around and saw him and got really scared and those were her last words … She wouldn’t have understood why. She would never think like that,” Maxie tells the media outlet.
“She was trusting but so vulnerable because she didn’t understand that not everyone is like her. She wouldn’t have understood it with every blow coming down on her.”
Courtney Herron with her mother Maxie.
Maxie says it was her daughter’s kindness – the small act of giving someone on the street a cigarette – that led to her death.
“It’s like a sliding doors moment. She died because of her kindness.”
Hammond was arrested on the afternoon of May 26. He initially denied knowing Courtney, but later told police he “recognised Courtney from a past life” and had finally gotten his “revenge” on her.
It wasn’t long after Courtney’s death that her family learnt that just weeks before the killing, Hammond had been released from jail after successfully appealing a sentence he had received for threatening to kill his ex-partner.
Court documents show that in April last year, Hammond was released on a community corrections order after serving a portion of a 10.5 month sentence for waving a knife in the face of his partner, before choking and punching her, fracturing her eye socket.
That’s despite a judge admitting the community corrections program was at odds with the killer’s free-spirited “nomadic” lifestyle, where he did not have a home base.
“My daughter would be alive now if Hammond wasn’t released. It’s had a devastating impact on her family, particularly her siblings who are struggling to get through this,” Courtney’s father, John Herron, said at the time in a special report for A Current Affair.
Maxie adds she was “appalled” when she discovered Hammond had tried to kill his ex-partner.
“Finding out that she need not have died had he not been released, it was the first punch in the gut. It was horrifying to discover he had tried to kill his ex-partner… I was appalled,” she says.
‘The system is broken’:
On Monday, the Supreme Court heard that two psychiatrists believed Hammond was in the midst of a relapse of his schizophrenic illness at the time of Courtney’s killing in May 2019.
Justice Phillip Priest accepted the evidence of the two psychiatrists. He directed a verdict of not guilty by mental impairment be recorded.
Maxie finds it hard to accept the testimony of the two psychiatrists and says Hammond’s story shows just how much Courtney was let down by “a very flawed mental health system.”
“If he has had schizophrenia since 2017 and was in and out of the mental health system, how come it wasn’t picked up? Why did they let him out if he was so ill?” she says.
Maxie says the ‘not guilty’ verdict was a punch in the guts. Credit: Luis Ascui.
She spent years trying to help Courtney, who battled a drug addiction from her late teens and spent time in hospital several times for her mental illness issues.
“We have a mental health system that is completely broken… We need to change the way we look at mental illness and how we are attacking it. We don’t have any other choice,” Maxie says.
But alongside the pain Maxie suffers, she still has good memories of those times when her daughter’s drug addiction wasn’t consuming.
“I don’t want people to think about her being hurt. I want them to remember her as funny, sweet, loving and a trusting person who was talented but couldn’t recognise that.”
Hammond was remanded until his next court hearing on September 14, when the court will make a supervision order.
The Sydney University Greek Society won a battle between Mediterranean Sydney University clubs after becoming victors in the ‘Mediterranean Feud’ on Wednesday night.
The COVID-19 pandemic unfortunately meant that all activities for university students across Australia were cancelled. However, organisers of the Sydney University Greek Society (SUGS), Italian Society (CUI) and Lebanese Society (YALA) came together to make a ‘family feud’ style competition over Zoom.
“This year we have had to be creative,” the SUGS said to The Greek Herald.
“With no on-campus events, we’ve had to think outside the box and get our members involved virtually. The Mediterranean Feud was a light-hearted event to allow our members to have some interaction not only with each other but with other societies as well, in this case the Lebanese and Italian societies.”
Each society held independent playoff matches to determine which team would be representing their society in the playoff on Wednesday, dubbed the ‘Mediterranean Feud’.
SUGS Members in the playoffs for the ‘Mediterranean Feud’. Photo: SUGS
Members playing for each team included:
SUGS: Zoe, Dimitri, Tom and Eric.
CUI: Yasmine, Lara, Cristina, Richard.
YALA: Emanuel, Mary, George, Anthony.
For each round, players needed to buzz in to claim the No. 1 answer and clean the board. Attempting to name Australia’s most famous Prime Minister’s, SUGS unfortunately didn’t manage to clear the whole board in round one, allowing CUI to steal the victory.
Next, competitors were asked to determine Australia’s most popular sport, with CUI buzzing in first. CUI left no other society the chance to answer, taking the round with a clean sweep of the board and leading 192 points to SUGS’ and YALA’s zero.
A comeback was staged in the third round by SUGS after CUI only managed to answer 5 out of 8 of Australia’s most popular regional towns. Team member Dimitra managed to pull out ‘Berry’ and claim her team 55 points for the round.
After an intense debate over Australian slang, contestants were asked to name Australia’s most popular slang words. After SUGS claimed top answer with ‘g’day’, they couldn’t manage to get all 7 answers. Unbelievably however, the Greeks still managed to claim the points after neither the Italian or Lebanese societies could find an answer.
The results proved that none of the societies really knew Australian slang as well as they thought.
With SUGS at 148 points and CUI at 192 points, YALA were unfortunately left in the dust at the bottom with zero points on the board.
The Greeks continued on their comeback to try and name the most Aussie foods, looking to jump ahead of the Italians. After SUGS swept up the points for the round, they led the competition with 248 points on the board, ahead of the Italians by 56 points.
The winner came down to who could answer the most important question of the game; Australia’s most popular animal.
After CUI nabbed the Koala top spot, they had a road to victory yet only managed to find four answers. This gave the Greeks the opportunity to nab the victory with ‘wombat’, winning the Mediterranean Feud.
The Sydney University Greek Society thanked all participants and hoped that the event would continue on next year.
Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, announced yesterday his government had signed an agreement with UK-based drug company, AstraZeneca, to secure a potential COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Oxford University.
If the vaccine clears trials, the Federal Government would manufacture it and make it free for all Australians.
But that’s unlikely to be until early 2021 at the earliest, Mr Morrison said.
A few hours later, Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, confirmed on Twitter that the European Union had also “reached an agreement with AstraZeneca to pre-purchase 300 million doses of vaccine,” and if trials were successful, the first doses of the vaccine would be “available in December 2020.”
Η ΕΕ ήρθε σε συμφωνία με την AstraZeneca για προαγορά 300 εκ. δόσεων εμβολίων. Σύμφωνα με αυτό το συμβόλαιο και εφόσον -το τονίζω- το εμβόλιο αποδείξει στις κλινικές δοκιμές ότι είναι αποτελεσματικό, έχουμε την ελπίδα ότι θα έχουμε διαθέσιμες τις πρώτες δόσεις τον Δεκέμβριο 2020. pic.twitter.com/D2Y6gJduUA
With these mixed messages around when the potential coronavirus vaccine will be made available to the public in Greece and Australia, we decided to separate the facts from the fiction and give you some answers.
Drug firm denies Australian PM’s vaccine deal claim:
Today, drug company AstraZeneca has denied Morrison’s claim he has reached a deal to secure 25 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine being developed by Oxford University.
The pharmaceutical company’s UK headquarters told pharmaceutical industry newsletter, Pharma in Focus, all the government has is a letter of intent (LOI).
“The LOI doesn’t go into any detail about costs or numbers or anything until we have an idea of what the manufacturing capacity is – that’s a critical piece in the puzzle,” a spokesperson said.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Professor Peter Kelly meet with team members of the Analytical Laboratory at AstraZeneca in Sydney. Picture: Getty Images.
Mr Morrison has also claimed CSL will manufacture the vaccine here, but AstraZeneca says as of now there is no such deal.
“Discussions with CSL are ongoing. They’re still looking into whether they have the capability and capacity to produce a vaccine. We’re hoping that those discussions will be concluded swiftly but they’re still ongoing,” the spokesperson said.
European Commission refutes Greece’s claim that vaccine is expected in December2020:
The European Commission confirmed on Tuesday there is no accurate timeline for the vaccine as yet.
“We are in a situation where we cannot tell the exact date of delivery. We are working to have the vaccine ready as fast as possible and as safe as possible,” EU spokesperson, Vivian Loonela, told EURACTIV.
Loonela added that the executive is currently in talks with several pharmaceutical companies to make sure enough vaccines are available for EU member states, as well as for donations to low-income countries.
Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou has met with Militsa (Emilia) Kamvysi and Efrstratia Mavrapidou, two of the three elderly women who are known as the “Lesvos grandmas.”
Their famous moniker came about after they were captured by a local photographer helping a young Syrian mother who had just landed on the shores of Lesvos island after making the treacherous crossing from Turkey in October 2015.
The photo which made the ‘Lesvos grandmas’ famous. Source: Lefteris Partsalis.
“You are like grandmothers to all of us. You made us all proud and we thank you for that,” Sakellaropoulou told the two women, now in their 90s, during a visit to the seaside village of Skala Sykamias on the northern coast of the island on Tuesday.
Maritsa Mavrapidou, the third woman captured in the 2015 photo, died two years ago.
Kamvysi, who was bottle-feeding the baby in the photo, was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ top national security adviser stepped down on Wednesday, after suggesting that Greece conceded ground to Turkey in the neighbours’ ongoing face-off over offshore energy rights in the eastern Mediterranean.
Alexandros Diakopoulos said his comments, which he had later retracted, “caused confusion and created a problem” for Mitsotakis and his center-right government, “which was not my intention.”
Over the past 10 days, Greek and Turkish warships have been shadowing each other between the island of Crete, southern Turkey and Cyprus, waters where Turkey sent a research ship to look for potential undersea gas and oil deposits. Turkey and Greece are historic regional rivals and nominal NATO allies.
The Oruc Reis travelling towards Crete. Photo: Turkish Defense Ministry.
Greece says it has exclusive economic rights on much of the seabed Turkey is surveying, and demanded that the Turkish government withdraw the Oruc Reis research vessel and its naval escort. Ankara refused to do so, arguing it has every right to prospect there and in waters claimed by Cyprus.
Diakopoulos embarrassed the Greek government by saying in a TV interview that the Turkish ship had been able to conduct research — contradicting the official narrative that Greek naval ships deployed to the area had prevented any real work from being carried out over the country’s continental shelf.
Greece’s main opposition Syriza party contrasted the national security adviser’s comments with the government’s contention that any attempt to breach Greek sovereignty would trigger a harsh response.
Mitsotakis has balanced tough talk with a desire to avoid starting a military confrontation with Greece’s much bigger and more heavily-armed neighbor. The prime minister has also focused on drumming up support from European Union partners and other regional countries.
Greek Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has called on Turkey to “stop the provocations” in the Eastern Mediterranean and return to the negotiating table in order to resolve disagreements regarding the delimitation of maritime zones.
“My message to Turkey is very simple: stop the provocations and let’s start talking as civilised neighbors,” he said during an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour on Wednesday evening.
Expanding on this possibility, Mitsotakis referred to the recent agreement with Egypt for the demarcation of exclusive economic zones, saying it could “serve as a blueprint” for other agreements in the region.
Tensions between Greece and Turkey are ratcheting up after Turkey announced plans to keep exploring for gas in the eastern Mediterranean. Greek PM @kmitsotakis says “my message to Turkey is very simple: stop the provocations and let’s start talking as civilized neighbors.” pic.twitter.com/5Rik6fkg8M
“But this cannot happen if we are engaged in sabre-rattling and if we have to face, now and then, half the Turkish fleet sailing in the Aegean or the eastern Mediterranean,” he continued.
He also reiterated a proposal for Athens and Ankara to refer the issue to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, if bilateral discussions do not yield any results.
“We should sit and discuss as civilised neighbours and if cannot resolve this issue the two of us, we can always take it to the international court and have the court decide on our behalf,” Mitsotakis said.
“But what we cannot tolerate is unilateral activity by Turkey claiming what we consider to be Greek exclusive economic zone and for Turkey to challenge this premise by sending not only an exploration ship, but also a significant number of military vessels to the area.”
