The Greek Vice-President of the European Parliament, Eva Kaili, who finds herself at the center of a resounding corruption scandal that has led to her imprisonment, is a former television news anchor who later became a controversial figure in the Greek Socialist Party.
The duties of the 44-year-old European representative were suspended, Saturday, as Vice-President of the European Parliament, less than 11 months after she was elected to this position, due to an investigation launched by the Belgian Public Prosecutor.
The European deputy, with long blond hair and a piercing look, was imprisoned, Sunday, in Brussels, after an investigation by the Belgian Public Prosecutor on suspicions of “corruption” and “money laundering” within an organized gang.
And “bags full of money” were found in the house of the forty-year-old deputy, who was seen in her country at one time as the rising star of the Socialist Party (Pasuk-Kinal).
Kylie, who is originally from Thessaloniki, the second city in Greece, began entering politics at the age of twenty, when she became a municipal councilor in 1998 while pursuing her studies in architecture.
After obtaining a degree in architecture, she began studying international and European relations and followed lessons in media.
Deputy at the age of twenty-nine
The Greeks got to know Eva Kayali on television when she began presenting the news bulletin on the local Mega station between 2004 and 2007.
That year, she was elected to the Hellenic Parliament at the age of twenty-nine. At the time, she was the youngest member of the PASOK party.
In 2014, she was elected to the European Parliament in the Socialists and Democrats group, and retained it as a result of the European elections in 2019.
In January 2022 she was elected Vice-President of the European Parliament since the first session.
Eva Cayley was part of the delegation that aims to develop relations between the European Union and the Gulf states.
Visit Qatar
In this context, she visited Qatar before the start of the FIFA World Cup.
“Today, the FIFA World Cup in Qatar is concrete evidence of the way sports diplomacy can lead to a historic transformation in a country whose reforms have inspired the Arab world,” she said from the rostrum of the European Parliament on November 22.
In her country, Eva Kayley has distanced herself from PASOK several times.
During the agreement between Athens and Skopje on naming this small Balkan country, which has become known as “North Macedonia”, Kylie wrote in a tweet, “I feel ashamed. This is irreparable damage to history, Macedonia and the Greeks.”
Thus, it took a position similar to the Greek conservative party that opposed this agreement, and considered that the name of Macedonia is linked to the history of Alexander the Great, and to a region in northern Greece, and therefore cannot be granted to another country.
In 2019, she said that “social allowances are for the idle,” criticizing the social benefits distributed by the radical left to counter the economic crisis that has brought the country to its knees and plunged many Greeks into poverty.
And the head of the Greek Socialist Party, Nikos Androulakis, confirmed, on Saturday, that Kylie “acts like a Trojan horse of new democracy,” that is, the ruling right in the country.
“I told her that she would not be a candidate in the ranks of our party for the upcoming European elections,” he stressed.
The head of the party, a European deputy, also blames her for trying to mitigate the seriousness of the eavesdropping issue, which tarnishes the reputation of the current conservative government.
In the face of the scandal and the suspicions surrounding it, the Greek Socialist Party excluded her from its ranks, and many deputies asked her to give up her position in the European Parliament.
In the context of this case, her Italian life partner, Francesco Georgi, a former parliamentary aide and expert in human rights and foreign relations who is seven years her junior, was arrested.
They have been in a relationship for five years, and they have a two-year-old daughter.
Tags: presenter suspect resounding European scandal .. Eva Kylie
