Santorini: violations on 12 of 26 tourist boats

Violations on twelve of the twenty-six boats inspected were found by inspectors of the Independent Authority for Public Revenue at the port of Vlychada on Santorini, as part of the operation ‘Krouaziera tha se pao 2026’. According to the figures released, the value of the transactions inspected came to 92,000 euros and the fines imposed to 43,000 euros. The violations recorded concern the non-issue or inaccurate issue of receipts, failure to produce documents during the inspection, the collection of sums above 500 euros in cash, a practice not permitted by law, as well as the application of a lower VAT rate than the one provided for.

One element of the methodology is crucial to reading the numbers. The boats were not chosen at random: the targeting was based on intelligence and algorithmic data analysis, that is, the inspectors headed for specific day boats and catamarans that had already been identified as likely cases. The 46% that results from twelve out of twenty-six is therefore not an estimate of the rate of violation across all the tourist boats of Santorini, nor can it be generalised for the sector. It reflects the effectiveness of the targeting and not the general picture of the market, a distinction that is often lost when such findings are presented as ‘one in two boats’.

For Santorini, the tourist boat business is one of the most dynamic sectors of the local economy, with day cruises in the caldera, to the volcanoes and to the volcanic islets. The port of Vlychada concentrates a large part of that traffic during the summer months. Inspections in this field bear directly on competition between businesses: those who issue documents properly and pay over the VAT provided for are in a worse position than those who do not. The findings belong to a wider context: according to the 2025 figures, the rate of violation in inspections nationwide came to 33.73%, in the Cyclades to 33% and in the Dodecanese to 39.72%, while a suspension of operation of at least 48 hours was imposed on 300 businesses and 202 cases of an unconnected card terminal were recorded, with fines of 2.59 million euros.

According to the Independent Authority for Public Revenue, the on-site inspections are followed by cross-checks for earlier periods, in order to establish whether the violations were of a repeated nature. It has not been announced whether there will be new operations at the ports of Santorini during August, nor whether the same inspections will be extended to other islands of the Cyclades. The businesses on which fines were imposed retain the right of administrative appeal. The overall sums reported relate exclusively to this particular operation and do not reflect the total of the inspections carried out this year in island Greece.