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THESSALONIKI:Thessaloniki farmer Anna Aivazidi’s blood boils when she thinks of the huge sums siphoned off in a major EU farm subsidy scandal.
“I earn 300 euros ($355) in subsidies a year. I struggle to produce every day. I feel extremely wronged,” the 40-year-old told AFP.
“Subsidies should go to real producers,” she said.
Aivazidi is among thousands of Greek farmers who say they were penalized for years while others profited, in a massive scam allegedly assisted by government officials.
The scheme began following a change in the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy, which in 2014 shifted subsidies from livestock to land.
Greece’s land registry at the time was woefully incomplete, however, meaning ownership over much of the country was unclear.
To facilitate them, farmers were allowed to declare land owned elsewhere in Greece to claim a share of the subsidies. Non-farmers with political connections got in on the action, lured by the prospect of easy money.
“The fraud essentially involved the process of appropriating or declaring public pastures by individuals who were not genuinely active farmers and who didn’t own animals to use them,” said Moschos Korasidis, former vice president of OPEKEPE, the government agency that handled the EU payments.
Genuine farmers lost an estimated 70 million euros a year, he said.
“The scheme was well organized... it was a criminal organization which naturally required political cover,” said Giorgos Drosos, 65, a wheat and cotton grower in Thessaly.
Greek authorities estimate at least 23 million euros in EU farm subsidies went to fraudulent claimants. But the full cost could be even greater, according to the European public prosecutor’s office.
“Our subsidies were slashed by 70 percent while phantom (farmers) pocketed thousands of euros,” said Pavlos Spyropoulos, a 49-year-old cotton farmer from Trikala.
False declarations
An EU probe has shown widespread abuse of funds handed out by OPEKEPE, which, according to the government, annually disbursed more than three billion euros in subsidies to 680,000 farmers.
“Such illegal practice may have been organized in a systematic manner with the involvement of (OPEKEPE) officials,” the European public prosecutor’s office said in a statement in May.
The probe is primarily focusing on the period after 2019 under the conservative administration of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
Mitsotakis has said that the fraud began in 2016, and has insisted that two agriculture ministers appointed by him, who are under investigation, bear no criminal responsibility.
“We have been clear on this — no criminal responsibilities arise,” the prime minister told Antenna TV recently.
One high-profile case is the conservative party’s former coordinator for EU funds, who resigned in August. She denies any wrongdoing.
In a further blow to Mitsotakis, the EU probe has found that most of the allegedly fraudulent claims came from the island of Crete, where his family has held political influence for over a century.
According to OPEKEPE, approximately 80 percent of total subsidies granted from 2017 to 2020 for pastures ended up in Crete.
While the number of livestock farmers across Greece is decreasing, in Crete, 13,000 new farmers were registered between 2019 and 2025, with the number of declared sheep and goats doubling over the same period.
Mitsotakis on Wednesday stressed that state auditors had seized 22 million euros from 1,000 spurious tax accounts.
“You can’t call that a small sum. And the checks go on,” he told Antenna.
He added that it was “obvious” that members of his New Democracy party would be involved in an “extensive corruption case” because “we are the biggest party.”
Mount Olympus bananas
Eye-catching cases under investigation are pastures declared in archaeological sites, olive trees in a military airport, and banana plantations on Mount Olympus.
“They set up a shop with European Union money. The politicians knew. It was a business,” said Nikos Kakavas, head of the federation of geotechnical civil servants.
“If the European Prosecutor’s Office hadn’t intervened, nothing would have happened. We’ve been shouting about this for years, but no one listened,” Kakavas said.
There was no absence of red flags, argued Athanassios Saropoulos, head of the Greek geotechnical chamber’s Macedonia branch.
In the Chania region, seat of the Mitsotakis family, in the first eight months of the year, nearly one million registered sheep and goats produced 12 times less milk than in the Larissa region, he said.
“This cannot be explained by any technical or scientific terms,” Saropoulos said.

HONG KONG: Southern Chinese cities scaled back many aspects of daily life on Tuesday with school and business closures and flight cancelations as the region braced for one of the strongest typhoons in years that has already killed three people and led to the displacement of thousands of others in the Philippines.
Hong Kong’ s observatory said Super Typhoon Ragasa, which was packing maximum sustained winds near the center of about 137 mph (220 kph), is expected to move west-northwest at about 14 mph (22 kph) across the northern part of the South China Sea and edge closer to the coast of Guangdong province, the southern Chinese economic powerhouse.
China’s National Meteorological Center forecast the typhoon would make landfall in the coastal area between Zhuhai and Zhanjiang cities in Guangdong between midday and evening on Wednesday.
Already hoisting a strong wind signal, the observatory in Hong Kong will issue storm warning signal No. 8, the third-highest in the city’s weather alert system, on Tuesday afternoon. It recorded wind speeds of 84 mph (135 kph) near the ground at a distance of about 75 miles (120 km) from the typhoon’s center, indicating a wide coverage of hurricane force.
The city categorizes tropical cyclones with maximum sustained winds near the center of 185 kph (115 mph) or above as super typhoons to make residents extra vigilant about the approach of more intense storms.
The water level is forecast to rise about 2 meters (6.5 feet) over coastal areas in the Asian financial hub on Wednesday morning, and the maximum water level in some areas could hit 4 to 5 meters (13.1 to 16.4 feet) above the typical lowest sea level.
The government said the water levels could be similar to those recorded during Typhoon Hato in 2017 and Typhoon Mangkhut in 2018 — estimated to have caused the city direct economic losses worth over 1 billion Hong Kong dollars ($154 million) and 4.6 billion Hong Kong dollars (about $590 million), respectively.
Residents living in flood-prone areas have already put sandbags and barriers at their doors, while others have put tape on windows and glass doors to brace for strong winds. Many people stockpiled food and daily supplies on Monday, as some market vendors reported that their goods were selling out fast.
Schools were closed in Hong Kong and the neighboring city of Macao. Other cities such as the Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen and Foshan in Guangdong province and Haikou in Hainan province ordered class cancelations and a gradual suspension of other businesses and transportation.
Hundreds of flights were canceled in Hong Kong. Shenzhen airport will halt all flights from Tuesday night. The Macao government was evacuating residents and tourists and ordered bridges to close in the evening as it expected Ragasa would pass within 62 miles (100 kilometers) to the south of the casino hub on Wednesday morning.
At least six people were injured and over 7,000 people were evacuated in Taiwan when the typhoon swept south of the island, and over 8,000 households were impacted by a power outage, the Central News Agency reported.
In the Philippines, Ragasa left at least three people dead and five others missing and displaced more than 17,500 people in flooding and landslides set off by the most powerful storm to hit the Southeast Asian archipelago this year, the country’s disaster-response agency and provincial officials said.
The dead included a 74-year-old man, who died while being brought to a hospital after being pinned in one of four vehicles that were partly buried by mud, rocks and trees that cascaded down a mountainside onto a narrow road on Monday in the mountain town of Tuba in Benguet province, officials said.
Two other villagers died in the storm, including a resident in Calayan town, a cluster of islands off northern Cagayan province where the super typhoon made landfall on Monday, officials said without providing details.
Ragasa, Tagalog for scramble, prompted the Philippine government on Monday to close schools and government offices in the densely populated capital region and 29 northern provinces. Fishing boats and ferries were prohibited from venturing into very rough seas and domestic flights were canceled.