Modern-day Greek myths

EVEN if, like me, you didn’t attend a school where it was a curricular fixture you will doubtless be aware of Greek mythology: that collection of ancient legends about gods, goddesses, heroes, and monsters that explains the origins of the world and the meaning of human life.

- Chris Rundle

And you might, equally, be interested to know that when it comes to creating myths the Greeks have still been very much at it, though in a totally modern context.

Specifically, when they have been collecting their annual handouts from the European Commission to support their farming activities. In the course of which, as a major investigation has just revealed, a great deal of money has being fraudulently claimed.

We should not, naturally, be too surprised at this. In regions of the European Union remotest from its centre fiddling the paperwork is a daily occurrence. In fact the further such areas are removed from the beady, controlling eyes of Brussels the more likely it is that a certain amount of cooking of the books will be an accepted element of the local economic culture.

Over the years spectacular examples of such practices have come to light. Such as the celebrated Corsican dairy cows fraud. Here, despite the predominantly mountainous terrain of the island being hardly conducive to dairy production, Brussels was suddenly deluged with subsidy claims for large herds of milk-producing cattle herds whose size appeared to have grown spectacularly almost overnight.

Farming families were claiming for hundreds of head of cattle they didn’t actually own because they didn’t exist and declaring ownership of thousands of acres of land they didn’t actually farm.

Greece, particularly its 227 inhabited islands, is another country where advantage has frequently been taken of nod-and-wink local bureaucracies and where there is quite a bit of previous in pulling the wool over the eyes of officialdom, occasionally with strange and unanticipated results.