All these claims are as ludicrous as they are lucrative, and they point to an embarrassing scandal that is roiling Greek politics: the revelation that for years, enormous sums of EU funds were being pocketed by individuals claiming them as subsidies for agricultural work that did not exist.

A third of the EU budget, more than is allocated to education and welfare and renewable energy combined, goes to subsidising the agriculture of member states. The more animals there are, the more land is allotted to them to graze – and the more cash gets distributed. In Greece, farming subsidies are dispersed from Brussels to the tune of €2bn a year, equivalent to about a quarter of the country’s wildly bloated annual military budget.

On the face of it, this emerging OPEKEPE scandal – taking its name from the acronym of the Greek state agency that oversaw the allocation of European farming subsidies – could be regarded as an act of revenge. A decade after an economic crisis in which European technocrats imposed humiliating austerity measures on the Greek working class, have wily Cretan farmers started conjuring up millions of imaginary sheep and swindling back cash from Brussels?

It’s a tempting interpretation, but it’s not the story here. In reality, OPEKEPE is looking like a con conducted at the behest of the same political elite that landed Greece in such catastrophic financial waters to begin with. A European investigation into OPEKEPE, begun in 2020 and carried out by the Luxembourg-based European public prosecutor’s office (Eppo), is alleging a cash grab that may have been “organised in a systematic manner” across the state.

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Starting possibly as far back as 1998, but appearing to ramp up with the election of the right-wing New Democracy party in 2019, Greece’s agricultural balance sheet was distorted. Auditors were reportedly elbowed aside as plots of new farmland were registered to one individual one year, then transferred – on paper – to another the next. Crete was statistically tweaked into possessing half of Greece’s sheep, even as it became difficult to explain how they were producing less than a 10th of the country’s sheep milk. Bee populations more than doubled on islands raging with fires or parched by drought. Two Greek former ministers are alleged to have spent years “aiding and instigating the misappropriation” of EU agricultural funds.

So many thousands of fraudulent or exaggerated claims now prompt unavoidable questions. Where did the money go? Who benefited? An investigation continues under Laura Codruța Kövesi, the head of Eppo, who endeared herself to Brussels when she was chief prosecutor of Romania’s national anti-corruption directorate by taking a blunt hatchet to her country’s political class, locking up hundreds of Romanians in the most sweeping anti-corruption drive in recent European memory.

It is evident already that the ruling New Democracy party – the dynastic old machine of the Greek right – is deeply involved. Thirteen of its MPs have been implicated in OPEKEPE’s deceptions (as have a Pasok MP and a Syriza MP). A cabinet minister and four deputies have been forced to resign. For his part, the prime minister and New Democracy leader, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has said he has “nothing to hide” and vowed to get to the bottom of the scandal, though he now balks at the idea of a full-scale parliamentary investigation. He personally received EU agricultural subsidies from 2014 to 2021. (A government spokesperson has defended Mitsotakis’s actions, saying that he was under no obligation to give up his historical right to the funding and that “what applies to every landowner applies to him as well”.) “Who are you kidding, Mr Mitsotakis?” Nikos Androulakis, the president of the Pasok opposition, asked in Greece’s parliament last month. “Mr Mitsotakis is either complicit,” said Syriza in a party statement, “or being blackmailed by his ministers.”

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The scandal has also pulled back the curtain to reveal how power in Greece operates. Three OPEKEPE heads who questioned financial irregularities were reportedly tossed out, one after he attempted to block some 3,500 suspect subsidy applications, another after blocking 9,000 payments. Wiretaps conducted by European authorities recorded officials who feared concerns being raised yet insisted on fraudulent payments being waved through anyway. As European inspectors arrived in Crete, farmers were reportedly warned in advance and ordered to shift herds around to keep up appearances. Flushing the island with European subsidy cash appears to have made a considerable chunk of its voting bloc happy. This was the point, Mitsotakis’s opponents have argued. Indeed, in one of the more seismic realignments of the Greek political landscape of late, Crete – a former leftist stronghold – flipped to New Democracy in 2023. (The government’s spokesperson said: “The connection between the fraudsters under investigation and any change in the election result is unrealistic, a product of science fiction.”)

Let’s call this scandal what it is: one more financial blow for which Greek taxpayers will again foot the bill. The fine already exacted by Brussels, approximately €415m, will be offloaded on to what has become the EU’s most overworked yet third-worst-paid citizenry; to meet it, the equivalent of all 10 million Greeks would have to labour eight hours each at the country’s minimum wage. More fines are expected in the coming months as Kövesi’s investigation widens.

For six years now, Mitsotakis has assured Greek voters that he is clearing out decades of inherited rot from the Greek state. He talks of technocratic overhaul, a “new Greece”, a land airlifted out of the depths of financial destruction and managerial chaos. But crisis after crisis unfurls every contradiction in these assurances. In 2022, his nephew was forced to step down as general secretary amid the exposure of a ridiculous spyware operation – only for talk to begin of him returning to his uncle’s office two years later. In 2023, Mitsotakis’s minister of infrastructure and transport resigned following a train crash in which 57 people were killed after safety warnings over Greece’s rail system were ignored – only for him to slip back into his former parliamentary seat once the uproar of mass outrage had begun to subside. Such scandals are treated like inconvenient public-relations dust-ups in which the problem isn’t a political class that cycles in and out of office with impunity but Greeks who demand consequences of those who lecture about accountability.

Greece is already a place where the narrative of resplendent new prosperity – an emergent tech hub booming with foreign investment – has proven illusory for most. But increasingly it threatens to devolve into something else: a place where the people are told the corruption that keeps devastating their finances and their trust is just one more figment of the imagination.

• Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens