ENGLISH SECTION
30/06/2025 | 16:26
Mitsotakis at the cabinet meeting: A special task force is being set up for OPEKEPE
Addressing a meeting of the cabinet on Monday, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis spoke about the significance of the European Council’s conclusions for Greece, while also announcing that a special task force will be set up to recover EU aid that was wrongfully paid out by the OPEKEPE payments authority.
He noted that the European Council reached positions that are very favourable for Greece, both in terms of the country’s sovereign rights and on the migration front.
“These developments are responsible for the spasmodic reactions we are now seeing with respect to the so-called Turkish-Libyan memorandum. You know, action provokes reaction. We also remember the summer of 2020, when we delimited the EEZ with Egypt, and to a certain extent Libya’s reactions are due precisely to the fact that Greece is exercising its sovereign rights on the ground, by searching for fossil fuels within the Greek EEZ, by initiating maritime spatial planning and, of course, our presence through the Armed Forces in protecting the southern maritime borders of our homeland from gangs of traffickers.
“And it is important to say that, once again, the European Council confirms that this text between Turkiye and some Libyan authorities is illegal and this has now bben said with the seal of Europe and with Greek responses being given responsibly on the ground. So the perpetual worriers at home need not be alarmed and, above all, let us not define our own positions externally, based on arguments put forward by our neighbours.”
Commenting on the OPEKEPE affair, Mitsotakis reiterated that the problem, while it obviously exists in other European countries, was and is much more extensive in Greece. “I think that the inadequacy of the state is quite obvious, it is an inadequacy that we have tried to correct, but the truth is that, to date, we have not been able to rectify it. I think that the government responded to this chronic problem and responded before this case saw the light of day, by placing OPEKEPE essentially under the full responsibility of Independent Authority for Public Revenue (AADE). I had even said at the time that any ‘knot’ that cannot be untied is severed, and indeed the dialogues that came to light, I think, justify this decision.”
“Behaviours of the past on the part of our party can no longer be tolerated,” he underlined, adding:
“We are already turning a page. We are doing this in collaboration with the European authorities so that the agricultural aid system can be restored. The funds that were lost can be returned. And for this reason, we will immediately proceed with the establishment of a special investigative task force with the participation of persons from the financial police and AADE and all the competent inspection bodies. Its mission is very clear and I expect results very quickly. We will immediately and exhaustively investigate, with all the inspection means available to the state, the cases of illegal payment of aid in order to make it possible to record all those that were unduly paid to their recipients and always in accordance with the applicable EU and national legislation. Since OPEKEPE was unable to fulfill this mission, the state will assume it centrally.”
source ANA-MPA
