A key whistleblower working for a state farm subsidies agency that’s at the heart of a European Union fund misuse scandal has won a court battle to regain the senior auditing position from which she was “illegally” demoted, her lawyers said Monday.
Lawyers for Paraskevi Tycheropoulou said in a statement that an Athens court has ordered her reinstatement as director for internal auditing at the now-defunct state OPEKEPE organization.
The statement by Anonis Vagianos and Paraskevas Zourdos said the court ruled that Tycheropoulou’s demotion by then OPEKEPE director Kyriakos Babassidis to a position in protocol – where she had no access to the agency’s computer system and effectively no duties – was illegal and due to “her behavior not being pleasing to the [OPEKEPE] management.”
Tycheropoulou has claimed that OPEKEPE officials were involved in systematic fraud, allowing livestock breeders to fraudulently claim large sums in EU subsidies over the years for non-existent flocks.
Testifying during a parliamentary inquiry last year, she cited cases where select employees “managed to count up to 2,500 animals in one day,” inflating Crete’s livestock numbers by 1.5 million between 2015 and 2019.
Tycheropoulou said the “Babassidis administration as a whole” fostered a climate of fear at OPEKEPE, and claimed that conservative former agriculture ministers Giorgos Georgantas and Lefteris Avgenakis “certainly knew” about the objections she had raised to payment of suspect subsidy claims...
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