When she started working at the Payment and Control Agency for Guidance and Guarantee Community Aid (OPEKEPE) 24 years ago, she didn’t expect to find herself in the vortex of a high-profile, European-scale scandal.
Paraskevi (Vivi) Tycheropoulou, an inspector at the disgraced agency responsible for distributing European farming subsidies, and the key witness in the ongoing investigation by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), was among the first officials at OPEKEPE to notice discrepancies in payments and uncover how the complex scheme was set up.
When she blew the whistle and began to acquire a voice through judicial rulings and probes, she found she was up against an entire system – she was demoted, threatened, sued and slandered – but she did not back down. She has received some vindication from the revelations of the EPPO, but still faces a long fight for full moral restitution. In the meantime, however, the message to anyone even thinking about following her lead has been sent, loud and clear: Interference comes at a price.
Disdain
Tycheropoulou grew up in Elefsina, an industrial town west of Athens and one of Attica’s poorest, and studied crop science at a technical college (TEI) in Crete. Her lack of “respectable” academic credentials is still held against her, she says, and has often been used as an excuse to cut her down within OPEKEPE. The agency seems to have mislaid the memo informing it that technical college degrees have been equal to university degrees for years. Her opponents also seem to overlook the fact that she went on to secure a scholarship from the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY) and did a postgraduate degree in plant biotechnology at the University of Reading in the UK.
As she was finishing her studies, Tycheropoulou saw an opening at OPEKEPE while looking at job postings on the website of ASEP, the public sector’s recruitment agency. She didn’t know much about what OPEKEPE did, but she applied for the job nevertheless. Her professors in England thought she would find the work in a public organization dull, but she wanted to return to Greece. She took up the post in October 2002 with all the enthusiasm of a young graduate who believes that hard work and diligence will be rewarded. She had another thing coming. It was obvious from the onset that OPEKEPE was run by cliques, but this became even more apparent when she applied for a higher position in 2011 and was rejected. Nevertheless, she found satisfaction in her work. The organization’s inner workings – its payment and audit procedures – intrigued her. Her colleagues thought her nosy and annoying.
She also took an interest in workers’ rights and joined SYRIZA’s union in the Agriculture Ministry. When the leftist party was elected to government in 2015, Tycheropoulou believed OPEKEPE would change its ways and operate in a more “meritocratic” manner. She was wrong. In the meantime, she had already started looking into the subsidy distribution system and noticed that something was awry. Seeing that nothing was being done under SYRIZA to change things, she gave up on unionism and says she has not maintained any party affiliations since.
Grigoris Varras was appointed to head OEPEKPE in 2019 and was the first president in a decade to conduct evaluations within the organization. Spurred by complaints from Grigoris Kalliouris, an employee of the agency’s Crete Directorate, about nonexistent livestock and grazing land, as well as the bare-faced threats Tycheropoulou was receiving, he decided to initiate inspections. What he found was that he could not rely on the organization’s own auditors.
The recommendations he received contradicted his own findings, so he chose to turn to individuals outside the system. Tycheropoulou’s supervisor at the time recommended her for the position of deputy director in the Audit Directorate. Many senior officials within OPEKEPE voiced their opposition. They claimed she was not capable and, in any case, that she had previously been affiliated with SYRIZA.
Suspect tax numbers
Tycheropoulou was formally notified in September 2020 that, by decision of the president, she would participate in the audit committee for the national reserve subsidies. Attached was an Excel file listing 99 tax identification numbers (AFMs) for review. As she began looking into them, she discovered that grazing land was being declared in locations far from the beneficiaries’ or owners’ base, and that these individuals were rotating each year, with the same plots of land repeatedly changing hands. At first, she thought it might be a coincidence, but she soon noticed a recurring pattern involving specific families.
That’s when she realized that the problem originated from inside the organization itself, from its audit procedures. Meanwhile, pressure for her to leave the committee was mounting. Varras remained firm that she should not step down, but additional members were brought in, expanding the committee to 11. The AFMs were divided among nine members, with instructions to carry out only superficial checks – verifying merely whether a lease agreement existed, without any cross-checking over previous years.
But Tycheropoulou had already inspected the 99 suspect AFMs and compiled a report with her findings. She co-signed the committee’s conclusions, emphasizing that the subsidies should not be paid out, and submitted her own report to the president in a sealed envelope.
In this report, Tycheropoulou described how audits were being conducted, the circular leasing practices and the fact that the cases had already been ostensibly reviewed by the Crete branch without any irregularities being identified. She referred to a climate of fear, saying that pressure was being exerted on agency employees and they were unwilling to speak out. Subsidy applicants knew exactly how the audits were carried out and were, therefore, easily able to bypass the system. She described the mechanism as “systemic fraud,” saying that individuals at various levels were exerting pressure and noting that the findings were so blatant that no auditor could reasonably have overlooked them. She also questioned how such experienced staff within OPEKEPE failed to detect these issues.
‘First blood’
Varras widened the scope of the investigation, sparking a war in OPEKEPE’s Athens headquarters. In mid-October 2020, Tycheropoulou went to Kea, one of the Cycladic islands closest to Athens, to verify whether three livestock farmers from faraway Crete actually possessed the huge tracts of grazing land they had declared there. She discovered that the reported plots were in fact entire mountains, impossible to belong to just one or two tax identification numbers or to qualify as grazing land. The evidence of the false declarations was compiled and the case file was forwarded to a prosecutor. This was the first OPEKEPE case to result in a unanimous conviction at the first instance, in 2024.
In late October 2020, Varras appointed Tycheropoulou to head the department of “unduly paid funds.” Within a week of doing so, he was forced to resign, though not before referring three more cases to the courts; Tycheropoulou was a witness in all three.
In March 2022, OPEKEPE’s then president, Dimitris Melas, transferred Tycheropoulou to a different department, where she no longer had access to information concerning whether the payments she had blocked were being made. In the meantime, Giorgos Georgantas had stepped in at the Ministry of Rural Development. He expanded the investigation into the declared pasturelands, blocked more than 2,000 AFMs from receiving subsidies and demanded Melas’ resignation. Tycheropoulou, for her part, was frustrated in her new post and had embarked on a doctorate at the University of Thessaly.
In July 2022, however, OPEKEPE got a new president, Evangelos Simandrakos, who put her in charge of the Direct Payments Department. That gave her access to the data once again. Together with several colleagues, she developed profiles of every beneficiary who, since 2018, had improperly obtained grazing land entitlements. This led to the suspension of 5,400 tax identification numbers.
Then Lefteris Avgenakis and Kyriakos Babasidis stepped into the leadership of the ministry and OPEKEPE, respectively.
The pressure to release the payments became overwhelming. One of the suspect livestock farmers, Giorgos Xylouris, also known by the nickname “Frappe,” found Tycheropoulou’s private number and called her house, where he spoke to her children. According to the case file, he also openly threatened Tycheropoulou during a conversation with a high-ranking official at the Rural Development Ministry. “Honestly, if I’d killed her, I’d be out by now,” he is alleged to have said. The situation went even more off the rails after the 2024 convictions over the Kea case.
Locked cabinet
Tycheropoulou learned that she’d been ousted from her post from colleagues. Babasidis had even announced her ouster on the public sector’s Diavgeia website, citing “professional inadequacy.” She was prevented from going to her office and the file cabinet where she kept important documents was locked. Babasidis accused her of hiding documents and when a bailiff was eventually summoned to open the cabinet, he said the lock had been forced. She still hasn’t been able to retrieve the drawings given to her by her children that she kept there.
Meanwhile, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office, with which she continues to work closely on its investigations of OPEKEPE, had requested her temporary transfer back in July 2024. The request was approved by Justice Minister Giorgos Floridis, but it also required the signature of the new agriculture minister, Kostas Tsiaras. It was sent to his office in September 2024. Tycheropoulou met with him, and he asked why she wasn’t looking for a job abroad. “Because I love my country,” she replied. She also asked that the decision posted on the Diavgeia platform deriding her professional performance be withdrawn. Tsiaras replied that signing the transfer would effectively amount to vindicating her.
In the end, the application stayed on his desk for months, until the next president of OPEKEPE, Nikos Salatas, formally raised objections, forcing the EPPO to withdraw the request. This unfulfilled ministerial promise is what hardened Tycheropoulou’s resolve.
She says she believes in Mahatma Gandhi’s maxim that if you remain faithful to the truth, justice will sooner or later prevail. Her first vindication came last week, when the Single-Member Court of First Instance of Athens annulled the decision of the Babasidis tenure. It ruled that her removal was unlawful, abusive and vindictive, prompted by actions that were not to the leadership’s liking. It also ordered that she be restored to the post of director of internal auditing – with a financial penalty of €100 for each day of noncompliance – the restoration of her lost wages, and the payment of compensation for moral damages, along with coverage of her legal expenses.
Still in the cold
Nevertheless, when OPEKEPE was relaunched by the government following the revelation of the scandal, Tycheropoulou was not included on the staff. The directive to this end was signed by Giorgos Pitsilis, the governor of the Independent Authority for Public Revenue (AADE). On March 26 – as the court’s decision was just about to be announced – a decision was published in the Government Gazette stipulating that directors of OPEKEPE, which is now part of the AADE’s General Directorate (GDELEP), must have a degree from a university, not a technical college (even if it is supplemented by postgraduate qualifications).
Tycheropoulou still faces two disciplinary proceedings and one criminal complaint filed by Babasidis – she had already been penalized with loss of pay in the first disciplinary case – as well as one disciplinary proceeding and one criminal complaint filed by Salatas. As for her colleagues who did not defend her, Tycheropoulou says she understands them, but does not excuse them. In any case, repeated efforts by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office to find other expert witnesses to work with within the organization have come to nothing.
The message about the risks of “interference” has clearly taken hold. The deterrent effect has worked – no matter its toll on justice.
AADE’s response
Asked to comment, AADE said the exclusion of those with technical education had already been foreseen since December 2025, when the responsibility for agricultural subsidies was transferred to it. Specifically, it was established that the general directorate and the directorates of the central service of the new General Directorate for Audits, Subsidies and Payments (GDELEP) would be headed by employees in the University Education (PE) category, as stipulated in Article 75 of AADE’s organizational framework for all directorates of its central services.
Subsequently, with the March decision, eligibility for these positions was expanded beyond AADE staff to include all employees of the central government administration, who are now also allowed to apply for positions as heads of directorates or sub-directorates. The aim is to attract potential candidates from across the public sector, with a view to strengthening meritocracy and the authority’s effectiveness in a sector that was only recently transferred to AADE and for which, as the authority emphasizes, it is looking for specialized expertise.