Vice-President of the European Parliament Greece’s Eva Kylie is at the center of a shocking corruption scandal that has led to her detention, is a former television presenter who has become a controversial figure in the Greek Socialist Party. The 44-year-old elected socialist was seen on Saturday It suspended his delegation as Vice-President of the European CouncilLess than eleven months after his election to this position, due to an investigation by the Belgian Prosecutor’s Office.
Entered politics at the age of 20
The smartly dressed Greek MEP, with long blond hair and a piercing gaze, was detained in Brussels on Sunday after an investigation by the Belgian federal prosecutor’s office on charges of “corruption” and “money laundering” in organized gangs. “Bags of tickets” were found in the home of the forty-year-old woman, who was considered a rising star of the Pasok-Kinal Socialist Party in her home country.
Originally from Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, Eva Kaili entered politics at the age of 20: an architecture student, she became a municipal councilor in 1998. With his architecture degree in hand, he began studying international and European relations and took journalism courses.
News presenter on a major Greek channel
Greeks later discovered her on their television screens: she presented newspapers on the large private channel Mega from 2004 to 2007. That year, at the age of 29, he was elected to the Greek Parliament. She was the youngest member of Basok at the time. In 2014, he was elected to the European Parliament in the Socialists and Democrats (S&D) group, a position he retained in the 2019 European elections.
In January 2022, he was elected Vice-President of the European Parliament in the first round. Eva Kylie was part of a delegation aimed at developing the EU’s relations with the Arabian Peninsula. In this case, he went to Qatar just before the start of the World Cup. “Today’s FIFA World Cup in Qatar is concrete evidence of how sports diplomacy, the reforms that inspired the Arab world, can lead to a country’s historic transformation,” he told the European Parliament’s Tribune on November 22.
The “shame” of the name given to North Macedonia
In her home country, Eva Kylie has repeatedly distanced herself from Pasok. When the agreement between Athens and Skopje ended a long dispute over the name of the small Balkan country, now called “North Macedonia”, he tweeted: “I’m ashamed. It’s irreparable damage to ‘History, Macedonia and Greeks’.”
It positioned itself in the same line as the Greek conservative party, which opposed the treaty, and considered that the name of Macedonia, linked to the history of Alexander the Great and a region in the north of Greece, could not be given to another country.
“Benefits are for lazy people”
In 2019, he said “benefits are for the lazy”, criticizing the social aid distributed by the far left (Syriza) to deal with the economic crisis, which has brought the country to its knees and left many Greeks in poverty. The head of the Greek Socialist Party, Nikos Androulakis, asserted on Saturday that Eva Kaili had “acted like a Trojan horse of the new democracy”. “I have informed her that she will no longer be a candidate for our party in the next European elections,” he insisted.
The party leader and member of the European Parliament criticized him for trying to play down the tapping scandal that has plagued the current Conservative government. Faced with this scandal and the suspicions hanging over the MEP, the Socialist Party of Greece (Pasok-Kinal) dismissed him and many elected officials demanded that he give up his seat in the European Parliament.
In this case, his companion, the Italian Francesco Giorgi, a former parliamentary assistant, expert on human rights and foreign affairs, seven years his junior, was also arrested. They have been together for five years and have a two-year-old daughter.
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