Athens: Dozens of suspects in a scam that siphoned off millions of euros in EU farm subsidies for years were taken before prosecutors on Thursday, police said.
Officers carried out 37 arrests Wednesday in the greater Athens area as well as in Thessaloniki, the island of Crete and other areas.
Over 20 unmarked police cars carrying the suspects pulled into the Athens police headquarters early Thursday, AFP reporters said.
Most of them had set out from Thessaloniki, where the detainees were held overnight.
The suspects were allegedly "involved in large-scale agricultural funding fraud and money laundering", the European public prosecutor's office (EPPO) said.
They face criminal charges that could put them in prison for up to 20 years.
The case has put major pressure on Greece's conservative Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, in particular given his family's decades-long political influence in Crete, where most of the allegedly fraudulent subsidies went.
The police action followed an October 13 raid by the European Union's anti-fraud agency OLAF on the offices of OPEKEPE, Greece's state agency supervising the payment of EU support funds to farmers.
A police statement on Thursday said the damage caused by the racket since 2018 amounts to at least five million euros ($5.8 million), and is expected to exceed 10 million euros after a full audit.
European prosecutors say the suspects, most of whom appear to have no actual connection to farming, "allegedly inflated livestock numbers to increase their subsidy entitlements".
"To conceal the illicit origin of the proceeds, the suspects are believed to have issued fictitious invoices, routed the funds through multiple bank accounts, and mixed them with legitimate income," the EPPO statement said.
The scheme began after the EU's Common Agricultural Policy began basing subsidies in 2014 on land instead of livestock. With a woefully incomplete land registry at the time, ownership across much of Greece was unclear.
Farmers were therefore allowed to declare land owned elsewhere in the country to claim a share of the subsidies.
Non-farmers with political connections got in on the action, lured by the prospect of easy money, according to the investigators.
Mitsotakis has said the fraud, which Greek authorities estimate amounts to at least 23 million euros, began in 2016, before he came to power in 2019.
