The former vice-president of the prosecutor’s prosecutor’s office has reiterated her position that the prosecutor’s prosecutor’s office is “utterly coptic”, Dimitra Halikia, deconstructing the “indictment” again.
Citing the 137 pages that have seen the light of day, she noted that “frankly, I am surprised how it is possible that such a paper with three felony charges has left the European Public Prosecutor’s Office.”
Talking to Aris Portosalte and SKY, he gave specific examples: “A New Democracy MP calls the then president of OPEKEPE, Mr Melas, and says I have a livestock farmer, etc. This phone call, the Prosecutor’s Office itself writes, takes place in August 2021. The cattle farmer he has passed an audit March 3, 2021, and it is over that he is not being paid. […] The employee replies and next year with health, it’s over, this year he is not paid. That’s why he will be blamed by a deputy. And they come up with three felony charges based on that, which are based on the following:the European Public Prosecutor’s Office itself, instead of using the actual mathematical formula that it has to use to see if it gets penalties or not, it uses another one. We have two payments to the farmers. Both the coupled ones, in this case it’s beef, and the single payment. One way the circulars and regulations deal with the controls and the linked payments, and that is why they are done separately, and another way they deal with the single payment.Those two, when you mix them up, they come up with some incredible things. In this case they came up with that figure that the European Public Prosecutor’s Office says this gentleman should have had penalties for three years, of 55%. But we only pay the associated ones for females and animals that give birth,” he explained.He clarified that these are things that a prosecutor who sits down and writes three felonies for someone else ought to see. It is not something hidden.
When asked about the convictions of the Greek judiciary in cases involving OPEKEPE, Dimitra Halikia explained that “they are different cases. The vast majority of those who have been convicted to date are people who received the National Reserve for grazing land without animals. It’s a different process. And these cases that have gone to court and some of them are in custody were done by our Financial Prosecution Service. Nothing has gone through the European Public Prosecutor’s Office that has gone to court and completed the process. I would have expected that after the first case file and all the things they wrote, they would have at least made a referral. Something.”
The former president of OPEKEPE also referred to the case of hierarchical appeals, where farmers from Serres go and make a hierarchical appeal to the minister.
“In administrative law we have hierarchical appeals and OPEKEPEPE has always accepted hierarchical appeals. We are obliged to someone who feels wronged. We are as employees I say, because I also feel and I am an employee. So we have an obligation to tell people what measures they can take. One of them is hierarchical appeals. So they’re on target that 37 people made chain of command appeals to the minister and the minister accepted them. And so they therefore consider that the person who helped them as a member of parliament to do the appeals process, and of course the agency employees helped them, is also going down for a felony.”
He said that in the Parliamentary Inquiry found a violation of the OPEKEPE system in old hierarchical appeals, 12 in number, which were made in the period 2022-2023, “people who were demonstrably in debt and had stolen from the Agency, because if they hadn’t stolen, half of them would not be in custody today, are through the Attorney General’s Office and these hierarchical appeals, which had already been forfeited by the president of the Agency, those who were running it at the time are being brought back, again by the president, when he has no right anymore, he has to go to the minister, he puts them up on paper “yes okay” and they get paid. That is the lady who owed Greece and the European Union 485,000 undue got another 300. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office has these in its hands.
“From the moment I opened my mouth and the narrative did not suit me, I have accepted everything. Out of court, lawsuits.. Mostly from the Agrarian Union of Agrinio and from Cognitera where there are some, in quotes journalists, who subjugate me from morning till night and say unbelievable things about me. These have gone the way of justice. But anyone who sits down and reads what they send me sees contradictions,” he continued revealing the war he is under.
He argued that the biggest problem of the OPEKEPE is the conflict of interest and “the revolving door they say, that is, people who were in the administration of the OPEKEPE, as soon as they left they either became general secretaries in the ministry under the responsibility of the OPEKEPE or mostly went out into the private market and joined the technical adviser. Along with the whole package of agro-unionists, then it was called PASEGES and now it is called ETHES.”
“This whole thing and the way it’s shaped is a total conflict of interest if you understand, Gianni buys, Gianni drinks. It’s one thing for cooperators and farmers to be involved in policy making and another thing for them to be involved in shaping the payments that they themselves receive. Because that’s what the OPEKEPE is: it does not formulate policy,” he explained.
He also referred to the GIA Enterprise, clarifying that “he was not just a technical advisor. He had all the cooperatives in and they set the framework for payments. They were making the ODS applications, who would be paid, when they would be paid, of course depending on the orders they received from OPEKEPE, and they were managing all the geospatial data of the country“.
He reiterated that the technical solution “because our country is still, unfortunately, in this very bad situation of not having good or no land databases in terms of agricultural land, it is not only distributing public pasture, we don’t know the public pasture, I wish we did, it is also distributing private land that is considered grazing land.”
He finally clarified that the subsidy is not directly to the animals because of the CAP. “This decision was in the context of the then European Union decisions on greening everywhere, green business, green countryside…” and that “they are lying when he says someone can impose a payment. The scams are with those who either don’t have animals and say they do. There is no such record in the first brief either.”
