Greece’s migration minister Makis Voridis resigned on Friday, the government announced, after claims that he was involved in a European farm subsidies fraud when he held the country’s agricultural development brief.
His resignation comes a week after the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) sent a case file to the parliament in Athens to investigate the alleged involvement of two former ministers in Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s government in the misappropriation of EU funds.
Three junior ministers and another senior government official also submitted their resignations on Friday, government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis said.
Voridis, a government heavy hitter, was agricultural development minister between 2019 and 2021 before being handed the migration portfolio in January.
In his resignation letter, he said he had “committed no wrongdoing” and had opted to resign following a request by the opposition PASOK socialist party to set up a parliament committee to probe the allegations.
“Being a suspect in a criminal act is not compatible with the status of a member of government,” Voridis told Mitsotakis, who accepted his resignation.
Voridis’s political career has not been without controversy: in 1994 he founded the far-right Hellenic Front, whose slogan at the time was “a red card for illegal migrants”.
In 2005, he joined the nationalist LAOS party, representing them in parliament from 2007 before moving to Mitsotakis’s conservative New Democracy movement from 2012.
Greek media reported that the second former agricultural development minister in the European investigation is Lefteris Avgenakis, who was in the role from 2023 to last year and is also an ND lawmaker.
At the end of May, investigators conducted a search at the Athens offices of the Greek subsidy agency OPEKEPE and seized documents and electronic equipment.
They then indicated that “a significant number” of people had gained payment rights between 2019 and 2022, mainly by falsely claiming public land.
“Such illegal practice may have been organised in a systematic manner with the involvement of (OPEKEPE) officials,” it added.
Greece’s current agriculture minister Kostas Tsiaras has promised “full transparency” in the disbursement of more than three billion euros ($3.5 billion) of EU farm subsidies, most of which goes to 680,000 individuals.
Source: AFP
