“The fight against tax evasion is delivering tangible results. It is a fair fight and a key pillar supporting the government’s social benefits and the tax cuts announced at the Thessaloniki International Fair. An additional €9.1 billion in revenue from curbing tax evasion between 2024 and 2027!”, Deputy Prime Minister Kostis Hatzidakis said in a social media post.
He noted that “the figures were published by Kathimerini on Sunday. This is not just a matter of upholding the law. It is also a matter of social justice, because these resources are already being channelled into tax cuts and support for our most vulnerable fellow citizens”.
The deputy prime minister explained that “this happened because the government, particularly from 2023 onwards, decided to launch a coordinated fight on this issue. That effort is continuing, as shown by what the ‘Greek FBI’ and the Independent Authority for Public Revenue (AADE) have uncovered in recent days about Pizza Fan, Choriatiko and the network of front men in northern Greece”.
Mr Hatzidakis said in his post that “at the heart of this policy are the 11 initiatives we adopted in 2023, when I was finance minister. I personally faced harsh criticism, both from the opposition and from various others who were comfortable with the status quo”.
The deputy prime minister recalled some of those initiatives:
Linking the cash registers of 490,000 businesses to POS terminals. This reform had been discussed for years and nobody believed it would actually happen. But it did!
Expanding myDATA, e-invoicing and digital cross-checks, giving AADE more modern tools to detect tax evasion.
Enacting the strictest regulation on fuel smuggling since the restoration of democracy, allowing non-compliant petrol stations to be sealed for two years, with no way to circumvent the penalty by changing their tax identification number. Fuel marketing companies are also required to inspect petrol stations themselves. The measures have already delivered tangible results in this area.
The system of rebuttable presumptions for the self-employed.
Restricting the use of cash to transactions of up to €500 and requiring property sales and purchases to be paid for only through banking channels.
All this has naturally been combined with AADE inspections. The authority has stepped up its efforts, set up the DEOS unit and made greater use of the latest digital tools.
Mr Hatzidakis said that “the exposure of the network of front men follows earlier successes by AADE. In 2023, for example, AADE uncovered €30 million in digital tax evasion by online shops. In 2024, among other cases, it uncovered a major tax-evasion ring involving mobile phone trading, as well as €10.5 million in tax evasion by two betting companies”.
“Today, we can assess these policies not by the widespread criticism they faced when they were adopted, but by their results. In 2024, additional revenue from curbing tax evasion reached €1.76 billion, and in 2025 it reached €2.2 billion. It is estimated to rise to €2.5 billion in 2026 and €2.7 billion in 2027. This is also reflected in the fact that, according to the European Commission, the VAT gap — the money the state loses through VAT — fell from 24% in 2019 to about 9% in 2024. That is in line with the European average!
This is the effort we began a few years ago and are continuing. We may have paid some short-term political cost, as happens in such cases, but we can now say that we have taken bigger steps on tax evasion than any other government since the restoration of democracy. That is what vindicates our policy choices.
Not pandering to certain political clients or groups thought to wield influence, but implementing a fair policy that ensures equality before the law for all citizens in practice. That is why we will go into the election not with words, but with concrete, measurable achievements”, Mr Hatzidakis concluded in his post.