The European Public Prosecutor’s Office in Athens announced on Wednesday it has filed indictments against 100 people suspected of fraud involving agricultural funds, for an overall damage of 2.9 million euros to the European Union’s budget.
At issue are three indictments filed in the past months, following investigations into schemes to defraud the EU of subsidies for the use of pastureland. If found guilty, the suspects face up to five years’ imprisonment and a fine.
Between 2017 and 2020, stockbreeders, mainly from Crete, successfully applied to EU agricultural funds destined to help the sector, paid by OPEKEPE, the Greek body responsible for the management of the funds from the European Agricultural Guarantee Fund (EAGF) and the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD).
According to the investigation, the suspects submitted false declarations of ownership or falsified lease contracts of plots of land which in reality they did not own or had not leased. The majority of the suspects lived in different parts of the country from what they had declared in their applications.
Sixty-four individuals, 56 suspected perpetrators and eight charged as accomplices, were indicted on 18 February this year, in a case scheduled to be heard before court on 16 May. Another 22 individuals, 16 suspected perpetrators and six accomplices, were indicted in January 2025, and will face trial on 24 March 2025. Finally, 14 other suspects, eight charged as perpetrators and six as accomplices, were charged last year. Their trial is scheduled for 30 May.
The investigations were carried out with the support of Greece’s Financial Crimes Prosecution Department of the Directorate for Combating Organised Crime of the Hellenic Police.
PS As we say in Greece to state surprise “Πέσαμε απ’ τα σύννεφα!”- “We fell from the cloud” but in fact #NOT! This has been a decades-long practice for EU and also Greek funds fraud, including the one that breeders declared larger number of cattle. Surprise is that they caught them! I remember reports from over a decade ago, that Dutch breeders/farmers used to do the same thing, so fraud in EU funds is a good old widespread European practice. 🙂
I think fraud involving agricultural subsidies goes on everywhere. When I was younger I used to work from time to time on a project on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. The agricultural system there was based around crofting and common land. Each crofter would own about 6 Hebridean cattle. Every morning they would turn their cattle out on to the Machair, a vast are of grassy flatland next to ther sea, and the cattle would gather together in large herds as they wandered up and down feeding. When the susidy inspectors visited, each crofter would claim that they had 50 or 100 cattle and would point to the nearby herd.
As far as I can tell the fraud was never discovered. All it would have taken was for a large team of inspectors to turn up at night, when the cattle would all return to their individual crofts, and visit a large number of crofts simultaneously.