Farming Scandal – Greek ‘FBI’ Raids OPEKEPE HQ

Greece’s special crime unit, tasked with targeting organized crime in the homeland, similar to the FBI in the U.S., raided the headquarters of the OPEKEPE, the Greek state agency responsible for distributing EU farming subsidies, as the farming scandal continues to draw attention in the media.

Accompanied by a European prosecutor, 20 agents from the Economic Crime Prosecution of the Directorate for Combating Organized Crime (DAOE) entered the central office of OPEKEPE in Athens on Wednesday to seize data from hard drives and archival material, including suspicious tax registration numbers (TRNs), as part of an ongoing investigation.

The farming scandal rocked the domestic political scene, with four ministers of the conservative New Democracy government resigning, the most prominent of whom was Migration Minister Makis Voridis, after they were implicated in the case.

The European Union has fined Greece roughly 400 million euros over the matter. OPEKEPE is accused of using fraudulent land leases and fake declarations, funneling millions of euros to non-existent farmland.

The bulk of the fake declarations appear to have been filed by livestock farmers from the island of Crete between 2019 and 2022.

Surprisingly, the only individual penalized for the scandal so far is Paraskevi Tycheropoulou, the head of OPEKEPE’s internal auditing unit, who uncovered the wrongdoings.