At the center of a corruption scandal that has led to her detention is Greek Eva Kyli, the vice president of the European Parliament, a former TV presenter who has become a controversial figure in the Greek Socialist Party.
The 44-year-old elected Socialist saw his delegation suspended as vice-president of the European Parliament on Saturday, less than 11 months after being elected to the post, due to an investigation launched by the Belgian prosecutor’s office.
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.
– Elected on 29 –
Then the Greeks found her on their TV screens: she presented newspapers on Mega, one of the main private channels, from 2004 to 2007.
That year, aged just 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.
– Arrival in Qatar –
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.
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 known as “North Macedonia”, he tweeted: “I’m ashamed. It’s an irreparable damage to ‘History, Macedonia and the 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.
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.
Nikos Androulakis, head of the Greek Socialist Party, vowed on Saturday that Ms Kailey 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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