The resignations were due to the fact that European Union prosecutors this week alleged that they were investigating 20 members of the ruling New Democracy party, including current and former members of parliament.

Prosecutors are also said to be investigating whether individuals who received agricultural subsidies had falsely claimed the subsidies.

Greek authorities estimate that the network scammed at least 23 million euros (27 million) since it began in 2018.

‘Widespread corruption’

“The ousting of the existing leadership of the Ministry of Rural Development is an indication of the rampant corruption whose backbone and centre is at the heart of the government” and the office of the prime minister, the prime opposing socialist party, Pasok.

“Of course, until yesterday, the prime minister was boasting that this leadership had brought sanity to the anarchy of illegal subsidies,” it said.

On 1st April, the European Public Prosecutor (EPPO) of the EU requested that Greece remove the parliamentary immunity of 11 members of parliament, accused of a crime that was allegedly committed in 2021.

The agency also reported having evidence of potential involvement of a former agriculture minister, his deputy, and five former MPs.

On Thursday, it reported that there were two more MPs who are under suspicion.

It claimed that the probe relates to an instigation of violation of fidelity, computer fraud and false attestation with the aim of gaining an unlawful advantage on behalf of another.

The suspects are not officially identified, but their names were extensively spread by Greek media.

News reports also indicate that the EPPI investigation was partially founded on the phone recordings, where the politicians are allegedly heard trying to win subsidies on behalf of their constituents.

“You had wolves that were the shepherds of the sheep, ” parliament speaker Konstantinos Barkas of the leftist Syriza party, told legislators.

Greek courts are not allowed to prosecute ministers independently. Any investigation will have to go through parliament in a tedious process that is often thwarted by the majority of the government legislators.

The police of Greece made dozens of non-political arrests over the scandal last year.

The scam was initially outlined by EU prosecutors in May last year, where subsidy beneficiaries were accused of claiming land that they did not own and inflating the number of animals on a farm.

There were those persons who received payments but were not related to agriculture.

The plan was initiated when, in 2014, the Common Agricultural Policy by the EU started to compute subsidies on a land rather than livestock basis.

The land registers then were not fully developed, leaving the ownership of much of Greece ambiguous. This was to enable farmers to report land owned in other parts of the country to receive subsidies.

‘Thieves’

Other cases that are under investigation are pastures proclaimed on archaeological locations, olive trees in a military airport and banana plantations in Mount Olympus.

The accusations resulted in raids and arrests last October and a series of protests by farmers who had their legal subsidies withheld.

The lion’s share of the fraudulent subsidies was in the island of Crete, where the Mitsotakis family, the creators of Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has dominated the politics of the island for over a century.

“The suspects are suspected of having made up fake invoices to cover the illegal source of the funds, sent the money via several bank accounts, and combined them with legal earnings,” the EPPO claimed in October.

According to Greek authorities, approximately 80 per cent of subsidies for pastures granted from 2017 to 2020 ended up in Crete.

And as the livestock farmer population in Greece is falling, 13,000 new farmers are registered in Crete from 2019 to 2025. The declared sheep and goats increased twice.

Mitsotakis, who adds that the fraud started prior to his election in 2019, has promised to jail the thieves behind it and recover the money.

In Greece, there will be an election next year. The conservative party led by Mitsotakis is ahead in opinion polls, which is unlikely to get an absolute majority.