A report by Politico covers the investigations by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) into Greek citizens who, since 2017, received EU funds for land they did not own or lease, or for agricultural work they never carried out, depriving legitimate farmers of funds they were entitled to.
The EPPO is looking into how the system was set up and the potential involvement of state authorities, particularly officials from OPEKEPE (Payment and Control Agency for Guidance and Guarantee Community Aid), the agency responsible for distributing the subsidies.
While those involved have already been referred to trial, “no one within the organization has been charged. On the contrary, whenever officials within the organization attempted to take action to dismantle the fraud, they were removed by the respective Minister of Agriculture,” the report states.
As much as €45 million per year may have been “lost,” with Politico calling it one of the largest agricultural frauds in recent years.
Since 2005, OPEKEPE has been the sole authority in Greece overseeing the disbursement of EU subsidies (CAP). The agency, supervised by the Ministry of Agriculture, distributes €3 billion annually to 900,000 beneficiaries, including farmers, agricultural cooperatives, and export businesses.
The program began after changes in EU legislation in 2017, which opened more grazing land in the Mediterranean region. The land expansion, which Greece had lobbied for, included not only pastures but also scrublands and forested pastures.
As a result, the area covered by the program in Greece nearly doubled—along with the opportunity for fraud.
The Greek scandal is likely to provide new arguments for critics of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which accounts for a third of the EU’s seven-year budget of €1.3 trillion, according to Politico.
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