Fraud

The corruption prosecutor for Thessaloniki, Achilleas Zisis, on Thursday brought criminal charges of fraud, embezzlement and forgery against a bank branch in the northern port city and a senior employee of the branch who is alleged to have extracted 850,000 euros from 10 bank customers between 2013 and 2015.

Police forces across Europe and the United States arrested 178 people as part of a crackdown on money laundering last week and identified some 23 million euros (19.65 million pounds) in stolen funds, the European Union judicial agency Eurojust said.

Crime-fighting authorities have issued a warning to individuals and business to be on the lookout for a scam involving online financial transactions.

According to cyber crime officials, it is a "man in the middle" scam, whereby an unauthorized third party accesses an individual's or a business's sensitive data as it is being sent over the internet.

Two priests in Farsala, central Greece, have been sentenced to 18 and six years behind bars respectively, after they were found guilty of embezzling 930,000 euros from the Greek state through a scheme that involved forged salary lists for priests.

The fraud was discovered following an inspection carried out by a Finance Ministry unit in Thessaly in 2012.

Three fraudsters in Istanbul have been sentenced to 2,187 years each for inserting money-stealing devices into cash machines. 

The devices, called "parrots," allowed Romeo Catlabuga, 38, Mihail Cotorobai, 41, and Sergiu Constantinescu, 30, to access bank accounts in cash machines after they were used by customers. 

A prosecutor on Friday called on a court hearing the case against 19 Energa and Hellas Power executives accused of embezzling more than 100 million euros from the Greek state to find 12 of the defendants guilty of a string of charges ranging from embezzlement to money laundering.

Judges and prosecutors are to return to work in the coming days with a mountain of cases, many that have dragged on for months - if not years - to push through the slow Greek court system.

After elections to appoint new judges and prosecutors this coming Saturday, courts are expected to get back to work in earnest.

The Commission for Protection of Competition (KZK) established that Lidl Bulgaria had committed an offence through a misleading advertising campaign.

As a result, KZK imposed a sanction on Lidl amounting to nearly BGN 1.9 M, which represents 0.35 % of the company's turnover for the previous financial year.

Alparslan Çelik, who Russia has alleged killed Oleg Peshkov, the pilot of the Russian jet downed by Turkey on Nov. 24, 2015, was detained in the Aegean province of ?zmir on fraud charges, according to police sources. 

Students from the American University in Bulgaria (AUBG) are going on a tour around Bulgaria to perform an adapted version of the Broadway musical Catch Me If You Can with nine performances in five Bulgarian cities - Blagoevgrad, Sofia, Varna, Ruse and Plovdiv.