A telephone tip, two formal complaints and one anonymous letter filed in 2024 set in motion the investigation that dismantled an organized fraud ring which prosecutors say systematically plundered Greece's main social security fund, EFKA, by registering thousands of fictitious workers at shell companies for years.
By Anna Kandyli
Three accountants are identified as the ringleaders of an operation that investigators believe was running in its current organized form since at least 2018, with some participants allegedly engaged in similar criminal activity as far back as 2013.
The first crack came on April 5, 2024, when a man called the Financial Crimes Unit to report that he had been registered as a full-time employee at two companies since May 2023 — without his knowledge and without ever having worked there.
A subsequent Labor Inspectorate visit to one of the companies found it did not exist at its registered address, yet had declared 311 full-time employees, 11 part-time workers and one rotating-shift worker as of Feb. 6, 2024.
A second complainant told tax authority AADE that the same company had stolen his personal data and fraudulently listed him as an employee, accusing it of running a criminal organization engaged in fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, data protection violations, forgery and false declarations.
An anonymous complaint filed April 8 flagged another company in the network, whose caller said he had been listed on its payroll from April 2022 to January 2023 without ever signing a contract, while actually working for a different employer outside the Athens region.
A fourth complainant, a woman who appeared in person at the unit, said she had been shown as employed at three companies between October 2020 and November 2021 — two of which she had never heard of, and a third where she had worked for just three days before pandemic restrictions halted operations.
The detail that triggered the loudest alarm for investigators was that the listed directors of many of the shell companies turned out to be fictitious individuals who did not exist.
Defense attorney Stathis Mitsoukalis, representing one of the accused, urged caution.
"We are still at the investigative stage," Mr. Mitsoukalis told iefimerida.
"Let us not confuse the size of the case file with the extent of individual responsibility.
My client is a serious businessman with legitimate activities who found himself on stage as a spectator, drawn in by the promises of so-called business consultants who orchestrated this entire illegal scheme."