Yiannis,
Good point. Actually it seems that since the Hummingbird update, the rankings have disappeared. So I am going through all the SEO checkpoints and it seemed that spam backlinks was the viable reason for the site suffering in rankings. There is no notice that the site has been penalized so it appears to be due to the automatic due to the algorithm update. It has been 2 months since clearing the issues, but still no luck in rebounding on the rankings