Suspects in Greece EU farm subsidy scandal to face prosecutors
Source: NEOS KOSMOS
Dozens of suspects in a scam that siphoned off millions of euros in EU farm subsidies for years were taken before prosecutors on Thursday, police said, facing heavy charges.
Officers made 37 arrests Wednesday in the greater Athens area as well as in Thessaloniki, the island of Crete and other areas.
Five additional suspects are currently at large, but police said they had caught the group leaders.
Over 20 unmarked police cars transporting the suspects pulled into the Athens police headquarters early Thursday, AFP reporters said.
Most of them had arrived from Thessaloniki, where the detainees were held overnight.
They wore hoodies and items of clothing on their heads as they waited to board a bus to take them to the European public prosecutor’s office (EPPO).
The suspects were allegedly “involved in large-scale agricultural funding fraud and money laundering”, EPPO said.
They face charges of being part of a criminal organisation, fraud, obtaining false certification and money laundering from criminal activity.
If convicted, they could be imprisoned for up to 20 years.
Fictitious farmers
The case has put major pressure on Greece’s conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, in particular given his family’s decades-long political influence in Crete, where most of the allegedly fraudulent subsidies went.
The police action followed an October 13 raid by the European Union’s anti-fraud agency OLAF on the offices of OPEKEPE, Greece’s state agency supervising the payment of EU support funds to farmers.
A police statement on Thursday said the damage caused by the racket since 2018 amounts to at least five million euros ($5.8 million) and is expected to exceed 10 million euros after a full audit.
Police Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis on Thursday said state auditors have already seized around 25 million euros from spurious tax accounts.
“This is a major criminal organisation,” he told Skai TV, adding that other similar cases were expected as the investigation is ongoing.
“Very soon I will announce a new batch of (tax accounts) that will have to return money,” he said.
European prosecutors say the suspects, most of whom appear to have no actual connection to farming, “allegedly inflated livestock numbers to increase their subsidy entitlements”.
“To conceal the illicit origin of the proceeds, the suspects are believed to have issued fictitious invoices, routed the funds through multiple bank accounts, and mixed them with legitimate income,” the EPPO statement said.
The scheme started after the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy began basing subsidies on land instead of livestock in 2014. With a woefully incomplete land registry at the time, ownership across much of Greece was unclear.
Farmers were therefore allowed to declare land owned elsewhere in the country to claim a share of the subsidies.
Non-farmers with political connections got in on the action, lured by the prospect of easy money, according to the investigators.
Mitsotakis has said the fraud, which Greek authorities estimate amounts to at least 23 million euros, began in 2016, before he came to power in 2019.
Source: AFP
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