Several tens of millions of euros normally paid by the European Union to farmers have been diverted and never arrived in the pockets of farmers.
It is “the largest agricultural fraud of recent years” according to the politico media. Dozens, even hundreds, millions of euros from the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union have been misjudged between 2017 and 2024. The case broke out in recent months and has led to the opening of a new European prosecutor’s office (European Public Prosecutor’s Office, EPPO) to discharge an “organized fraud system”.
The CAP which provides funding and issues subsidies to European farmers has been abused by “false declarations of properties or pastures eligible for subsidies” reports The world. Supposed farmers declared to manage agricultural land on places proving to be “public land” often far from the population and dwellings. Abuses that started in 2017 thanks to an administrative breach created by a new European regulations revising the concept of “pasture earth” and making it wider. Since 2017, the number of fraudulent registrations of false farmers with the CAP has increased considerably, especially in 2019.
The EPPO, which conducts the investigations, has not yet communicated in the amount of fraud and damage so as not to “compromise the outcome of the current survey”, but the media Politico evokes the sum of 45 million euros not, 360 million if fraud has indeed lasted eight years between 2017 and 2024.
It was in Greece that this fraud was largely implemented and spotted, especially on the island of Crete. Figures from the Greek Ministry of Agriculture reported by The world Talk about themselves: only for sheep farming about 7.8 million heads were declared by all registered farmers, including fraudsters, in 2025 against 2.4 million heads in 2020. A herd, as substantial as all French farms combined, which requires 1.6 million hectares of pastures to be high. However, the island of Crete is only 8.5 kilometers of area, half less than the necessary space and even less if we take into account the residential areas.
These fraudulent declarations led to the payment of 67% of the PAC subsidies to fraudulent farmers in Crete, the remaining 23% being distributed among all the other farmers in Greece according to a deputy from the Greek opposition. A fraud that cost the honest farmers and victims of the deception dearly as explained by Moschos Korasidis, the director general of the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives in Greece: “It is all the Greek farmers who have been injured, since, as the multiplication of fraudsters, the funds received from the national reserve were being divided for all”.
The European prosecutor’s office, and the previous ones justified by reports made in 2018, made it possible to initiate prosecution against a hundred people accused of having illegally benefited from the PAC grants up to 2.9 million euros, but many remains to be done to find all the perpetrators of fraud. The survey also involves “members of the board of directors and Opekepe officials [l’agence grecque de paiement des régimes d’aide de la PAC, ndlr]”, Supervised by the Ministry of Agriculture. The latter would have looked at numerous reports made by farmers, and even by the Union of Agricultural Cooperatives according to Moschos Korasidis.
In 2024, as compensation, the European Commission demanded that Greece reimburse 283 million euros in Brussels according to Politico. The European organization considered that the expenses made by the CAP did not meet the criteria for grants.