Questions have risen over indications that the police’s Internal Affairs Division sent only part of the material it had collected in its investigation into a growing scandal over alleged fraud related to European Union farm subsidies to the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO).
The material in question concerns wiretapped phone conversations from 2021-2022, which revealed the involvement of a total of 20 politicians in the OPEKEPE case, as it is known in Greece by the acronym of the state agency responsible for the distribution of the aid.
According to one version of events, in the first case file that police sent to the Athens First Instance Prosecutor’s Office in the fall of 2021, most politicians’ names were absent or, according to another, contained only two.
Kathimerini understands that the EPPO realized the files were incomplete in the summer of 2023 and had to send repeated requests to the police to get the full transcript.
As stated in an official EPPO document, the Internal Affairs Service received on July 26, 2021, an anonymous complaint detailing fraud within OPEKEPE and against the interests of the European Union, which allegedly involved employees of the organization as well as local farmers. A few weeks later, a second anonymous complaint was sent with additional details about the same case.
Based on the two complaints, Internal Affairs tapped the phones of 16 suspects, mainly executives of OPEKEPE, including the then president of the organization, Dimitris Melas. Mellas is included in most phone conversations with the politicians mentioned in the new EPPO file that was recently sent to Parliament.
The evidence collected was submitted to the Athens First Instance Prosecutor’s Office in October 2022. Four months later, in February 2023, it sent the file to the EPPO. According to sources, the file contained the two anonymous complaints and part of the recorded phone conversations, which concerned five OPEKEPE employees. There were very limited references to the possible involvement of political figures, sources said.
In the summer of 2023, the EPPO sent the Internal Affairs division a new order requesting a better and more complete processing of the evidence. The new file was resubmitted in the autumn of the same year and contained, for the first time, the names of two politicians (of the 20 that were eventually named).
The EPPO made yet another request for the full transcript from the wiretaps dating from the summer of 2021 to the summer of 2022. The procedure was completed in 2025 and the additional evidence was submitted to the Organized Crime Division to run checks on the finances of the people mentioned in the transcribed conversations.
The final police report was forwarded to the European prosecutor just a few days ago. The EPPO moved quickly to form case files for the evidence dating to 2021 to prevent misdemeanors from becoming statute-barred. The wiretaps for the period from the start of 2022 to the summer of the same year will form the basis for new case files in the near future.