Greece: A White-Collar Crime Overview

White-Collar Crime: Recent Trends in Legislation and Law Enforcement

White-collar crime has remained high on the European and Greek legislative and enforcement agenda.

Legislation

The Council of the European Union adopted in May 2024 an ambitious AML/CFT-Package with the purpose of streamlining the rules and practices across member states. The Package relies on three pillars outlined below.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1620 establishing the European Anti-Money Laundering Authority (AMLA)

The new Authority, headquartered in Frankfurt a.M. and partly operational since July 2025, shall coordinate and provide guidance to national FIUs while directly supervising selected high-risk obliged entities in the financial sector across the EU. AMLA will also be able to impose deterrent sanctions on non-compliant entities.

Regulation (EU) 2024/1624 on the prevention of the use of the financial system for the purposes of money laundering or terrorism financing, effective from July 2027

The Regulation aims to harmonise national AML/CTF provisions and close regulatory gaps. It broadens the scope of obliged entities or individuals to include crypto-asset providers, crowdfunding platforms, football clubs and related agents, tax advisors, real estate agents, and traders of high-value goods. It also enhances due diligence requirements for all obliged entities with respect to identifying beneficial owners, the origin of assets and the purpose of envisaged transactions.

The Sixth AML Directive (EU) 2024/1640 to be transposed into national legislation by July 2027

All member states are required to create automated central registers of bank/payment/crypto accounts, which shall be directly accessible in real time to AMLA and all national FIUS and interconnected via the Bank Account Registers’ Interconnection System (BARIS). The Directive also requires centralised national beneficial ownership registers for all entities (domestic or foreign) as well as central registers of real estate properties.

The AML Package is supplemented by Regulation (EU) 2023/1113 on the transmission of information accompanying transfers of funds and certain crypto assets, applicable from December 2024, and the Directive (EU) 2024/1260 on asset recovery and confiscation, applicable from November 2026, which enables member states to swiftly trace proceeds of crimes and freeze them even pre-conviction while significantly expanding confiscation powers.

The AML Package creates a new EU-wide landscape of transparency that requires member states to establish new institutions and/or enhance existing ones and to adjust their legal tools and enforcement practices to comply with the new, elevated standards. Moreover, obliged entities and their legal advisors are called to put in place efficient due diligence mechanisms and costly compliance procedures to avoid existence-threatening sanctions.

Sanctions

On the sanctions front, the EU Directive 2024/1226 on the definition of criminal offences and penalties for the violation of Union restrictive measures marks an important step towards harmonising the definition of criminal offences and penalties for the violation of EU sanctions, including those adopted after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Though member states had until 20 May 2025 to transpose the Directive into their national law, 18 of them failed to meet this deadline, prompting the European Commission to open infringement procedures. Greece has transposed the Directive into its national law by Law 5232 of 22 September 2025, which was passed through the Parliament in a rather hasty procedure. Critics note that the new legislation does not fit well into the national system and contains vague definitions and unorthodox procedural rules, which are expected to create serious problems for law enforcement and judicial authorities.

Law enforcement

The European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO) Investigation “Calypso” has been a highlight of EU-wide enforcement. EPPO has dealt a significant blow to criminal networks flooding the EU market with goods fraudulently imported from China. Since June 2025, the EPPO has seized 2,435 containers at the Port of Piraeus, Greece, primarily filled with e-bikes, textiles, and footwear. This is the largest seizure of containers to date in the European Union. The EPPO-led investigation, spanning 14 countries and supported by Europol and national law enforcement agencies, is an impressive example of efficient cross-border cooperation against organised crime.

In a press conference at the Port of Piraeus on 2 October 2025, Laura Codruța Kövesi, European Chief Prosecutor, said that highly organised criminal networks mainly controlled by Chinese nationals “have grown accustomed to causing massive damage to our finances and economies with close to no risk. Investigation Calypso sends these criminals a simple message: the rules of the game have changed, no more safe havens for you! Now we need to turn this spectacular success into systematic work – we need dedicated and specialised police, customs, and tax investigators in the whole EPPO zone.”

The fraudulent scheme caused an estimated loss of at least:

• EUR350 million in customs duties; and
• EUR450 million in VAT.

Case law

Areios Pagos (Greece’s Court of Cassation) in pleno issued a controversial judgment on asset freezing and money laundering. The majority of the Court ruled that frozen assets at the pre-trial stage on suspicion of money laundering shall not be partly released to cover basic needs of affected persons in order to secure their possible future confiscation by a court’s decision. To this purpose, freezing orders shall also apply, according to Areios Pagos, to new “clean” funds credited to frozen bank accounts up to the value of the alleged proceeds of crime. A minority of the Court rightly pointed out that the above interpretation of the applicable provisions of the AML legislation is incompatible with the AML-Directives (EU) 2014/42 and 2024/1260, as well as with the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (Apostolovi v Bulgaria, judgment of 7 November 2019). In these circumstances, a legislative initiative to establish clarity in this highly sensitive area seems necessary.