A prosecutor has asked a court to convict two former senior officials of the country’s agricultural payments agency over the alleged concealment of an internal audit report into improper European Union farm subsidy payments.
During closing arguments before a three-judge misdemeanor court in Athens, the prosecutor recommended that former OPEKEPE president Dimitris Melas and Athanasia Reppa, the agency’s former director of technical controls, be found guilty of jointly harboring an offender and repeated breach of duty.
The prosecutor also argued that a third charge, involving the concealment of an official document, should be upgraded from a misdemeanor to a felony because the alleged financial damage exceeds 120,000 euros.
If the court agrees, it would no longer have jurisdiction over that charge and would have to refer the case to a felony court in Athens.
“The defendants displayed conduct that was inconsistent with their professional responsibilities. This was not negligence,” the prosecutor told the court. “They intentionally withheld from the prosecutor a 2020 report by [Paraskevi Vivi] Tycheropoulou recommending that the judicial authorities be notified.”
