The publisher, Kostas Vaxevanis, who owns and edits Hot Doc, a respected investigative magazine, was acquitted of misdemeanor charges by a judge on Nov. 1 after publishing what he called the Lagarde list — a list of account holders given to Greek authorities in 2010 by Christine Lagarde, when she was the French finance minister.

The case shone a light on the Greek authorities’ failure to effectively crack down on widespread tax evasion and fueled a debate over media freedom and personal privacy laws. Now, Mr. Vaxevanis is to be retried in a higher-level misdemeanor court on the same charges, and faces a two-year prison sentence if he is found guilty.

The Athens public prosecutor’s office found the judge’s verdict in Mr. Vaxevanis’s case to be “legally mistaken” and wants it re-examined, a court official said, adding that a date for a retrial had yet to be set.

“Such appeals by the prosecutor are not unusual, particularly in cases where personal privacy are concerned,” said Aristides Hatzis, a professor of law at the University of Athens, attributing the two-week delay between the verdict and the appeal to “standard judicial bureaucracy.”

During the trial, the prosecutor, Iraklis Pasalidis, accused Mr. Vaxevanis of “turning the country into a coliseum” by defaming people without determining their guilt. The publisher had countered that the names of bank account holders were not private and that the Lagarde list was “not a legal issue but a very important social and political one.”

In a Twitter post on Friday, Mr. Vaxevanis said, “While society demands disclosure, they cover up.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/world/europe/kostas-vaxevanis-cleared-of-privacy-violations-to-be-retried.html?partner=rss&emc=rss