A public servant in charge of fishing licences managed to siphon off €83,000 over eight years before anyone spotted she was at it.
The Public Ministry has accused the employee at the Agriculture and Fisheries Directorate for the north of the country of diverting the money handed over by fishermen.
The woman was a technical assistant and is accused of diverting licence money between 2007 and March 2015, when someone was bright enough to work out that she was on the fiddle.
A total of €83,341 is unaccounted for. With a knack of stating the obvious, the Public Prosecutor said it was the fact that the revenues "seemed very small," taking into account the large number of fishermen paying in cash for their annual licences.
The investigation concluded that the employee spent over eight years pinching money that should have been credited to the State. How the employee managed to get away with this blatant thievery for so long deserves its own chapter in the State auditors' training manual.
Fishermen can obtain a licence from the ATM network but if someone makes a mistake, either in the licence type or in the customer ID section, this can not be rectified and the fisherman loses his money – hence many still prefer to pay in person, much to the delight of the unnamed woman.
