This Europe: Fraudsters siphon off Greek leader's salary

The Greek Prime Minister, Costas Simitis, has been confronted by the narrow limits of his authority after part of his salary donated to charity was siphoned off by corrupt employees.

Mr Simitis pressed charges last week because auditors discovered that more than £50,000 of his income as a tenured university professor had found its way into the pockets of staff.

The former professor of commercial law at Panteion University, Athens, had done the decent thing on leaving the post to take control of the agriculture ministry in 1981, offering his tenured salary to help to maintain the university library.

"The Prime Minister had given orders that his salary ... go towards activities beneficial to the [university community] such as the Panteion library," said a government spokesman. "There was a problem in the management of these funds ... Charges have been filed against employees."

The affair became public as Mr Simitis' government faced pressure from Brussels to account for the disposal of EU structural funds.

Mr Simitis, an academic educated in Germany, returned to the professorship for a second four-year spell after resigning from the socialist government in 1987. In 1993 he returned to the cabinet and, when Andreas Papandreou died in January 1996, became Prime Minister and ceased to be paid by Panteion.

"The Prime Minister donated his salary ... for very specific purposes of public benefit and this must be respected," the Education Minister, Petros Efthymiou, told the university's rector, Yiannis Vavouras.

A fellow Panteion academic told The Independent the real scandal was that a decade of professorial income amounted to such a modest fraud.