Farmers ‘hostages’ – Colpo Grosso on aid payments – Economic Postman

Assistance payments to 650,000 farmers are hanging in the air as the OPEKEPE administration is not allowing the government’s 2024 filing platform to be fully operational.

At the same time, a series of errors made by the organization and its technical advisor in matters of payments raise doubts about the amounts paid to farmers, which has led to the threat of nearly 200,000 farmers having to recover 63 million euros.

Farmers: The individual aid application platform is open to individual producers, and closed to advertising reception centers.

Farmers

In particular, according to the complaints, the prevention of opening the 2024 IASC Declaration Submission Platform at Declaration Reception Centers testifies that games with specific commercial interests are going well…

But also the incorrect payment of €63 million, discovered by the European Commission – under the supervision of OPEKEPE – conceals an attempt to pay non-existent agricultural VAT figures.

OPEKEPE’s responsibility…

In particular, on July 3, the organization, by its announcement and in response to the relevant publications, revealed errors made by it and its technical advisor in matters of payments: “In the context of the audit of the accounts of the European Court of Auditors, carried out for the application year 2022, a horizontal error was found in the payment calculation process. In more detail, OPEKEPE continues, “The error resulted from the incorrect use of the rights line for 2021 instead of the correct year 2022, in a specific crossed check that led to an incorrect payment in July 2023. The error concerns 196,083 beneficiaries and the initial estimate of the amount was 63,035,249.77 euros, which after recalculation by OPEKEPE was determined to be 50,755,440.32 euros.

Errors, i.e. the money that farmers are entitled to…

In fact, OPEKEPE in its very announcement neither states nor states that the farmers will be asked to return these funds…: “These amounts are entered in the debtors’ book and are fully offset against future payments regardless of the amount of the year of the requests that concern them, following the standard procedure applied in such cases. Therefore, these are amounts paid without justification.”

Error.. Technical Advisor

For those who know how to calculate farmer support payments, which is done by the technical advisor (with long experience in payment matters…), they understand that the “error” resulted from the incorrect use of the 2021 due line instead of the correct year 2022 in a specific audit.

Sources told OT that the designated technical advisor did not use the rights and farmers’ data that was on gov.gr as of 2022 but the 2021 data that he had as a backup in his own facilities from his 2021 collaboration with OPEKEPE.

The same information states that “this arbitrary action, which led to the incorrect payment of 196,083 beneficiaries and the initial assessment amount was 63,035,249.77 euros, is not so innocent since it concerns an attempt to pay tax identification numbers that were under surveillance due to irregularities of the National Reserve”.

Settlement Payments for 2023

However, protests are also being expressed regarding the recent payments announced by OPEKEPE on July 4 and regarding the settlement of amounts for 2023.

On the one hand, payments are delayed, on the other hand, none of the farmers can know what they were paid and how the money they received was calculated, while there are also complaints about the “cutting” of aid.

Detailed information about what and how OPEKEPE pays is absent… The only thing that is certain is that the payment process was made and processed by the technical advisor himself with his known credibility!!!

President of ETHEAS

OT addressed the President of the National Federation of Agricultural Cooperatives (ETHEAS), Mr. Pavlos Satoulias, asking him to comment on the complaints regarding payments: “Our first impression is that OPEKEPE payments have not gone well and this is a result of the poor functioning of the organization.”

ETHEAS President Pavlos Satoulias

13.9 million support for farmers..

Indicative of the incorrect methods of disbursing aid, Mr. Satoulias revealed to OT: “There is a VAT number for a farmer in the Peloponnese who was paid €13.9 million a few days ago… This may be a mistake. But the mistakes of OPEKEPE and the technical advisor who are unable to move forward with the new technologies worry us about the future of farmers’ payments.

VAT numbers missing

Mr. Satolias was also accused of complaints about “errors” in the July 2023 payments and according to them, the incorrect calculation concealed an attempt to pay non-existent tax identification numbers: “You are referring to 16,000 tax identification numbers, some of which are illegally held hostage and the amounts must be released. However, there are also tax identification numbers that are paid at the expense of real farmers. Our position is clear: not only not to pay them, but to bring these cases to justice.”

“The money should go directly to the product,” Mr. Satolias stresses.

Payments for 2024 are up in the air.

Apart from that, the agricultural world is also concerned about the 2024 payments.

As OT revealed, the platform for submitting declarations to IACS has not yet been opened in declaration reception centers. It works with online applications to help farmers in the gov.gr environment, but for KYD, although it is exactly the same technology, its opening remains blocked…

“The most important thing is that we entered July and the KYD applications were not opened. Out of 650,000 farmers, only 2,500 submitted the declarations and these are the producers who submitted the applications themselves,” Mr. Satolias confirmed to OT and continued: “The more the opening is delayed, the less time is left to submit the declarations. It is completely unjustified that the platform is not opening in KYD. So, since the first aid payment is supposed to be paid in October, we are heading with mathematical precision to failure to pay. This is because when the declarations are submitted, there must be a check and corrections before the aid is paid.”

The head of ETHEAS emphasizes: “As farmers, we are not interested in the state’s choice of technical advisor. However, reliability criteria must be applied. What is the reliability of such mistakes that we farmers have to pay for ourselves? We want an operating system like the one on gov.gr. The data must remain in this public and transparent environment and not in the hands of individuals…”

Cereza

SYRIZA was also placed on the issue of payments and OPEKEPE errors.

He says in his announcement:

“The public admission by the OPEKEPE management, of the “incorrect payment in July 2023”, due to the “unintended use of the rights line for 2021 instead of the correct year 2022”, once again demonstrates the incredible confusion and total lack of credibility in the payment of EU subsidies, as a result of the disorganization of the organization’s work and of course the overall failure of the ND policy in the primary sector.
But, first of all, it is unpleasantly surprising how easily the relevant announcement tries to downplay the “error” in question, which “concerns 196,083 beneficiaries”, that is, almost a third of the beneficiaries, as well as the amount of compensation to be recovered (as it was unnecessarily paid), which, according to the decision-makers, finally amounts (!) to “50,755,440.32 euros”.

So this failure to pay EU subsidies correctly and transparently is simply a matter of numbers and not an administrative and political failure of decision-makers.
Likewise, the above announcement by OPEKEPE management raises a number of reasonable questions:

1. Should there be an audit by the European Court of Auditors, with the consequent seriousness and credibility of our country, to detect “horizontal errors in the payment calculation process” and should these “failures” not be prevented?
2. Does the fact that the audit was carried out by the European Court of Auditors and not by the European Commission make it of secondary importance, especially today when OPEKEPE is under supervision?
3. Who can now guarantee that payments from the past five years are accurate and valid, culminating in the last year when almost no producer understood how they were paid?
4. When will the government of the five Ministers of Rural Development and Food and the five Presidents of OPEKEPE finally take all the necessary and immediate measures to restore the work of the organization, as requested by its employees, and certainly our farmers,?

One is the indisputable fact: 5 years of rule by the “Negotiation aristocrat state” and EU subsidy payments have turned into a “lottery”, where the Greek producer no longer knows for sure, even recently, whether, when and how much they will eventually be paid. However, this pathological reality can no longer be considered an acceptable normality. There must finally be an immediate and practical assumption of political responsibility for all this chaos and a complete change of this situation.

This is what SYRIZA-PT will fight for with all its might, not out of oppositional obsession or sentimentality, but because it firmly believes that this battle is inevitably linked to the survival of the winter rural world of our country and is a duty and a duty. A duty towards it, against the incompetence, cruelty and arrogance of the ND party.

Pasok

In a joint declaration of the Agricultural Development and Food Sector (PASOK), the Movement for Change and MPs Manolis Schnary – Christina Starakas, Chairmen of KTE for Rural Development, we state the following:

“There is no end to the errors, omissions, extra-institutional interventions and irregularities that are constantly being detected in the organization supervised by the Ministry of Rural Development and Food OPEKEPE.

It has been recently revealed and confirmed by the current but eventually extended interim administration of OPEKEPE, that in the context of the audit of the accounts of the European Court of Auditors, an erroneous payment occurred in July 2023 relating to 196,083 products and corresponding to an amount of 50,755,440,32 euros.

According to OPEKEPE, these funds should be deducted from farmers as unjustified payments and some should be compensated with future payments.

However, for reasons of transparency and the credibility of the organization, we expect that the details of individual aid payments for the first year of implementation of the CAP Strategic Plan will be published in detail.”