Hollow victory for Constantine, ex-King of the Greeks
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Your support makes all the difference.A resident of Hampstead with no surname was awarded £8m in damages by the European Court of Human Rights yesterday, ending a bitter eight-year legal dispute with the Greek government.
Constantine, former King of the Hellenes, has been pursuing compensation for properties seized by the state after he fled Greece because of a military coup in 1967.
The award in Strasbourg was much less than the king's ransom of €470m(£310m) the court had been expected to order, leaving Athens to declare a victory for its refusal to settle the matter out of court. The panel of 17 judges appears to have taken Constantine's insistence that he did not want to inflict a heavy tax burden on the Greek public at face value, awarding only a fraction of the value of the seized properties. The court said in a statement that the "compensation did not need necessarily to reflect the full value of the properties".
Costas Simitis, the Greek Prime Minister, was a minister in a socialist government that legally sanctioned in 1994 the seizure of royal property during the 1967-74 junta. He greeted news of the unexpectedly low settlement as an "ethical and legal closure" of the issue.
The legislation in 1994 stripped the former monarch of his citizenship, unless he agreed to register as a commoner at a town hall and revoke his family's claim to the throne – conditions he has rejected.
King Constantine II, 62, has spent more than half his life in exile. He moved to the north London suburb of Hampstead in 1974, the same year 69 per cent of Greeks voted in a referendum to abolish the monarchy.
The descendant of the blue-blooded Danish royal house of Holstein and Glucksberg professes no desire to reverse the republican move, but remains bitter at his enforced exile.
"If the Greek people decide that they want a republic, they are entitled to have that and should be left in peace to enjoy it," he said in a recent interview. "I do not particularly enjoy the idea that because I was head of state of a different kind of administration I have to be penalised 30 years later and lose my house and my land."
But Constantine's relationship with his former subjects never recovered from his agreement to take part in the televised swearing-in of the colonels' regime that followed the military coup.
The ex-King's compensation claims have drawn fierce criticism across the Greek political spectrum, with some commentators raising the spectre of Bulgaria, where the former monarch returned to become the elected leader of the country. For the generation of politicians who grew up during the anti-junta demonstrations, discussion of the exiled King's rights has led to a furious debate. In a memo leaked in April, the Finance Minister, Nikos Christodoulakis, accused him of trying to damage the Greek economy and insisted that "not a single euro" should be paid.
The three estates at the heart of the tug-of-war – Mon Repo on Corfu, Monodendri in central Greece and Tatoi, north of Athens – are showing the effects of decades of legal limbo. The sprawling, semi-derelict summer palace at Tatoi, home to the family cemetery, is now a favourite spot for dog walkers and mountain bikers, watched over by bored policemen supposedly stationed to prevent trespassers.
The closest Constantine is likely to come to reclaiming his family seat is a visit in 2004 to the nearby Athletes' Village under construction for the return of the Olympics. The yachtsman who won Greece's first gold medal in 50 years at the 1960 Olympics is now an honorary member of the IOC and will be allowed to return to the country when Athens hosts the Games.
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