Two former officials at the heart of Greece’s OPEKEPE farm subsidy scandal have been convicted of harboring a criminal and breach of duty, each drawing a sentence of five years and eight months, though neither will serve time while an appeal is pending. The Athens Three-Member Misdemeanor Court convicted former OPEKEPE president Dimitris Melas and Athanasia Reppa, the agency’s former head of direct subsidies and technical projects, by majority verdict. The sentences were suspended, and both were allowed to walk free until their appeal is heard.
A more serious charge still to be tried
The same court sent both defendants to trial before the Three-Member Court of Appeals for Felonies on the graver charge of document concealment, which the prosecutor had earlier argued should be treated as a felony rather than a misdemeanor. Until that trial concludes, both are barred from leaving the country.
For the felony charge, the prosecutor had pushed for tougher conditions: a travel ban, twice-monthly check-ins at a police station, bail of 100,000 euros each, and a bar on holding any public post. The court imposed only the travel ban.
The prosecutor opposed suspending the sentences, arguing that some of the people named in Tycheropoulou’s audit, which he said the two officials had deliberately ignored, had gone on to collect 260,000 euros in subsidies. He also pointed out that Reppa has been seconded to the special coordination unit of Greece’s Recovery Fund, the country’s share of the EU’s post-pandemic recovery program, since October 2024.
At the prosecutor’s request, the court agreed to send the full trial record to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office. The aim is to let EU prosecutors weigh the evidence and decide whether to open their own investigation into others who may have been involved, from staff at local subsidy application centers to senior OPEKEPE officials and the agency’s political leadership over the years.
OPEKEPE, was the beleaguered and now defunct agency that administered EU farm subsidies in Greece. At the center of this specific iteration of the OPEKEPE scandal, is an audit compiled by whistleblower Paraskevi Tycheropoulou, which flagged evidence of large-scale subsidy fraud but, according to the charges, was never escalated through the proper channels to reach judicial authorities.
