Report finds oversights in party finances, funding to ‘ghost’ parties
A special parliamentary committee responsible for monitoring party finances warned Greece’s political parties to comply with regulations after discovering a string of oversights and violations in 2015 in its annual report, published on Tuesday.
Among other findings, the report revealed that several parties failed to conduct transactions via the bank accounts they are obliged to register in order to maintain transparency in their financial dealings.
It also accused certain parties of using funds that had been intended for research to cover other “operational expenses.”
The parties will not receive administrative fines for these violations, the committee said, but it did warn them to comply with parliamentary regulations henceforth or face hefty penalties.
Another finding made by the auditors was that several parties that are not even in Parliament received funding in 2017.
Among them, Panagiotis Lafazanis’s Popular Unity, which was formed after the leftist hardliner split from ruling SYRIZA, as well as Giorgos Karatzaferis’s defunct right-wing nationalist LAOS party, each received some 96,000 euros in funding last year, while two obscure parties – Panellinio Arma Politon and Pyrikafstos Ellada – were each granted 68,217 euros in 2017.
