The largest pension fund in Greece found 1,473 ghost retirees who received monthly allowances even though they were dead long time ago, illustrating the high level of fraud in the social system, writes Reuters.
IKA-ETAM fund chief, Rovertos Spyropoulos said that necessary measures were taken to prosecute those who received pensions of their deceased relatives in order to recover the loss of two million euro monthly.
The fraud was discovered when the fund started to check the records earlier this year for people older than 100 years, finding a lot of them, moving later to check the rest of the records.
“I fear that at the end of the analysis, on September 3, this figure would be several times higher”, said Spyropoulos TV station Skai.
The investigation was launched after the Socialist government, obliged to reduce the budget deficit, learned that there are over 9,000 pensioners aged over 100 years. Greece had thus the world’s largest concentration of people over 100 years.
The pension system in Greece, which has to get about 11 billion euro, is supported by loans from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union after the country debts became unsustainable.