Tax agency says will not reinstate OPEKEPE’s demoted whistleblower 

The Independent Authority for Public Revenue (AADE) said Tuesday it will not comply with a tribunal ruling to reinstate an worker working for a state workplace subsidies bureau that’s astatine the bosom of a European Union money misuse scandal, due to the fact that that presumption has been abolished.

 On March 30, the Single-Member Court of First Instance of Athens annulled a determination to occurrence Paraskevi Tycheropoulou from her elder auditing presumption successful OPEKEPE, the bureau that distributed EU assistance to farmers, saying the demotion by then manager Kyriakos Babassidis to a presumption successful protocol – where she had nary entree to the agency’s machine system and efficaciously nary duties – was amerciable and owed to “her behaviour not being pleasing to the [OPEKEPE] management.”

However, the AADE appealed against the ruling, claiming it is “non-enforceable” due to the fact that the lawsuit was discussed earlier OPEKEPE’s afloat integration into AADE connected January 1. The station was subsequently abolished, arsenic the specific interior audit responsibilities were transferred to the existing applicable section of the tax agency. It besides said that the assignment of employees successful positions of work “is carried retired done unfastened procedures.”

Tycheropoulou was a cardinal witness successful the ongoing probe by the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), and among the archetypal officials astatine OPEKEPE to announcement discrepancies successful payments and uncover however the analyzable strategy was acceptable up.

Dozens of lawmakers of the ruling New Democracy party, on with officials successful OPEKEPE and hundreds of farmers who had filed fraudulent requests for assistance person been implicated successful the ever-expanding scandal.