Farm Subsidies Scandal Generates Court Cases; Finger-Pointing

“OPEKEPE has never had its own IT system. It is a multi-functional process,” Minister of Rural Development and Food Kostas Tsiaras said last Tuesday, in reference to the disgraced Greek Payment Authority of Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), after a meeting with employees of the now defunct agency.

The latter’s workforce will now be transferred and absorbed into the independent tax bureau, known as AADE or IAPR.

The question then arises: how “multi-functional” was this process?

The backdrop, of course, is a high-profile investigation by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) into widespread fraud involving Community subsidies doled out by OPEKEPE’s services to bogus “young farmers” and stockbreeders, at least identified as such on paper, for fictitious herds and pasturelands.

One answer to the question lies some five years ago when the then head of OPEKEPE, Grigoris Varras, announced in a video message, the agency’s transition into the oft-cited digital age – in effect, its disengagement from Neuropublic, the company that until that point held the “digital keys” to OPEKEPE as its “technical advisor”.

Subsequent developments are now all too well known.

In 2020, Varras conveyed some 3,500 individual tax codes to a local prosecutor over the suspected payment of illegal subsidies, only to be forced to resign shortly afterwards. His successor, Fanis Papas, resigned after just two and a half months and after a few days after signing a decision cancelling an international tender for the OPEKEPE new IT system, which remained, as a source related to “BHMA”, “owned and a monopoly of Neuropublic”.

In the present, and after many years of engaging in this “multi-functional process”, the private company merely referred, in an official statement, to “publications that reproduce unfounded, false and unsubstantiated allegations”. Th announcement also added that company officials “have not been called even as witnesses in ongoing trials.”

Changing ministers
However, legal sources note that “a flurry of developments are expected from the European Public Prosecutor’s Office next week”. At the same time, top New Democracy (ND) cadre and current Minister for Migration and Asylum Makis Voridis, who was the farm minister during the period where the judicial investigation is now centered, appears to be shifting the “goal posts” of his own defense against whatever charges of omission.

While he initially stated that despite his signature on documents referring to OPEKEPE’s subsidized pastureland allocation, the agency was not under his jurisdiction, a “non-paper” subsequently circulated by his office claims he “ordered 3,500 checks, which however, were frozen due to pandemic. “After his departure (from the minister’s post) nothing was done,” is the new line of defense.

Still in unofficial mode, the Voridis camp maintains that he “signed the 2019 allocations under duress”, as the latter were a “legacy” from the recently ousted SYRIZA government. The latter had allegedly implemented an “artificial solution”, namely, a system under which pastures were transferred from region to region, and subsidies were given without ownership confirmed – of both the land and herds specified.

However, the “line of defense” appears to have caused reactions from within the government, as it is interpreted as “an attempt to shift the responsibility to Voridis’ successors in the ministry”.

At the judicial level, the scandalous system revolving around subsidies doled out by OPEKEPE, now the target of extensive probes by the Greece bureau of the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, and after the sudden confiscation of data and files at in the agency’s offices in Athens last month, has already generated eight indictments and charges that will lead to a court trial. Most of the legal proceedings are scheduled for the autumn in Athens courts, the jurisdiction of where OPEKEPE’s now abolished headquarters was based.

According to reports, the upcoming trials for the fraudulent payments worth millions of euros are based on information supplied by Grigoris Varras, a professor at the University of Ioannina, who took over as president of the agency during the first year of a New Democracy government after its election victory in July 2019. The period of alleged wrongdoing involving pasture land dates back to the beginning of 2019 and others throughout the same year.