In 2020, Angelos Giannakopoulos told Greek tax authorities he had earned 998 euros, or about $1,160, from salaried work for the entire year.
Two years later, he collected unemployment benefits from the state.
Greek prosecutors now accuse him of masterminding one of the largest tax and social security frauds in the country's recent history, one they estimate cost the state more than 100 million euros, or about $116 million.
Mr. Giannakopoulos owns Horiatiko, a chain of bakeries familiar to anyone who has bought bread on a Greek street corner.
His weekend arrest, near the Albanian border as he allegedly prepared to leave the country, stunned Greeks already reeling from a separate case just days earlier.
Police had charged 23 people tied to the Pizza Fan chain with hiding sales from the taxman. Within a week, two household food brands had become symbols of fraud on a vast scale.
The case touched a raw nerve in a country where tax evasion was long seen as a national pastime and was widely blamed for the debt crisis that brought Greece to the brink of bankruptcy a decade ago.
Ordinary Greeks endured years of tax increases and pension cuts.
According to police case files reported on Thursday by the Greek news site iefimerida.gr, Mr. Giannakopoulos declared 8,528 euros in wages in 2021.
In 2022, he reported no salary at all, collecting 5,294 euros in jobless benefits while listing income from subletting property.
Then, abruptly, his fortunes appeared to change. In 2023, he declared nearly 97,000 euros in wages, mostly as a cook at two restaurants on the glamorous island of Mykonos.
In 2024, he reported more than 78,000 euros. Investigators suspect the sudden rise was meant to justify purchases his tiny official income could never have covered.
Police say he ran a web of about 500 shell companies through front men, some of them dead. Fifty-nine people have been charged, and Mr. Giannakopoulos was scheduled to testify before an investigating magistrate on Thursday.
Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, campaigning ahead of elections expected next spring, has seized on the arrests as proof that his government is going after "the big fish."
But his citizen protection minister, Michalis Chrysochoidis, raised a more uncomfortable question this week.
The investigations ran for a year and a half, he said, and the involvement of state officials cannot be ruled out.
All the suspects are presumed innocent.
By Panagiotis Georgiou