The president of the organization’s workers’ union, Androniki Vasioulis, referred to the issue of OPEKEPE’s “understaffing” during her testimony to the parliamentary inquiry committee on the case of the payment system for agricultural subsidies. A state audit agency has been allowed to collapse, said Ms. Vassiouli, who said that since 2014, the number of workers has been steadily declining, also due to staff leaving in recent years for other services with better benefits and working conditions.

In Greece we have one auditor for 1,268 agricultural holdings, in France one for 141 holdings, in Spain one for 111 while in Ireland the ratio is one for 431, said Ms. Vassiouli. As for the reports of corruption, he said that, in the 23 years of OPEKEPE, the organization has paid out over 70 billion “without having been mentioned in the audit reports by four different agencies, points of corruption of officials, much less, that an official has been convicted.”

According to Ms. Vasioulis, the strategic choices and political decisions that determine the operation of the organization “are not the responsibility of the employees. However, we are the ones who are called to implement them, often under extremely stressful conditions, and at the risk of being targeted for mistakes and failures, which are not our responsibility, as is happening now.” He also emphasized that “the workers have never refused control, on the contrary they are asking for the processes to be controlled in an institutional way. We do not protect anyone or anything beyond the legitimacy and operation of the organization. We are the ones who, during the years of crisis, kept the organization in order to continue supporting the country’s agricultural production […] We do not approach our work as a field for experiments or academic theories because we fully understand the direct impact that such experiments have on family budgets and the lives of thousands of families who toil in the countryside. We ask once again for the staffing of the organization, a modern institutional framework for operation, control sanctions, operational information systems, reliable bases of other services and completion of those that are incomplete, such as the land register, and that we too be interlocutors in the decisive decisions for our work and in general for the operation of the new organization in AADE the next day”.

In response to a question from the rapporteur of the majority, M. Lazaridis about the issues of the technical advisor, he said that we are interested, whoever the technical advisor is, to provide the OPEKEPE auditor with that safe tool, so that he can do his job properly. On the same subject, he said that “we have always asked for the independence of the organization from individuals”.

To the question of the rapporteur of the minority, Milena Apostolaki, if she agrees with the description “scandal”, Mrs. Vasiouli said that “it is unfair to talk about a scandal of the organization while ignoring the surrounding situation, and that there are too many deficiencies and infrastructures in the public administration”.

Besides, in response to a question from the SYRIZA MP, Al. Meikopoulos whether the workers have been pressured, which resulted in “mandates” for payments, with which they have been disagreeing for the last six years, Ms. Vasiouli said that this “I cannot answer with certainty […] It has not come to my attention while I am participating in the union.”