ATHENS, June 24 (Xinhua) -- Candidate with Greece's main opposition conservative New Democracy (ND) party, Tonia Moropoulou, on Sunday quit the race in the July 7 national elections, over a pension scam.
The media revealed that she had been cashing her deceased father's pension illegally for seven years.
Moropoulou, a professor of National Technical University of Athens, was receiving the pension of her father who passed away in 1977 under legislation regarding support of unmarried daughters of deceased public servants.
However, under bailout programs implemented in Greece since 2010 to tackle the country's debt crisis, the law has changed so that Moropoulou and thousands of other women are no longer entitled to such benefits.
However, the professor still received subsidy until two years ago due to a bureaucratic mistake.
In her resignation letter to ND party leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Moropoulou claimed that she did not realize that she was no longer a beneficiary, because the pension fund kept making deposits.
Her debt to the state coffers stands at 71,000 euros (80,801 U.S. dollars), according to the media reports.
According to all recent opinion surveys, the ND is projected to win the July 7 elections. Moropoulou said she resigned so that the case will not harm the party's chance to win the electoral battle.
In a similar case in March this year, candidate Myrsini Loizou, with ruling Radical Left SYRIZA party in May's European Parliament elections, also quit the race amid public furor over illegally cashing her dead mother's pension for more than five years.
Loizou claimed that she had notified the authorities about her mother's death in 2007, however, due to bureaucratic reasons, the pension continued to be deposited in her bank account until 2012.
