Plan to privatize highways

Souflias pledges 761 new kilometers; contractors to run existing network

In a major program planned to expand Greece's national road network by 50 percent, the government said yesterday it would launch tenders for 761 kilometers of new highways, to be built with mostly private funds over the next five years.

Public Works Minister Giorgos Souflias said the self-financing system favored by the government would mean the state would only have to contribute 2 billion euros - half of which will derive from European Union subsidies - to the estimated 7-billion-euro cost of the new road work.

As an additional sweetener to construction firms, the deal will also involve Greece's entire standing highway network, some 1,425 kilometers, being handed over for 30 years to private contractors who would be responsible for road maintenance, while at the same time receiving all tolls paid by motorists, an estimated 150 million euros annually.

This, Souflias conceded, will totally revise highway pricing policies.

«The toll charges will be revised, but we have not yet decided to what extent and when this will happen,» he said. Ministry sources, however, indicated that all concession contracts would contain a clause as to the maximum possible charge, and the same tolls will be exacted for all Greek highways.

By the end of this year, Souflias said, tenders will be launched for new national roads from Antirio - linked with the Peloponnese by a brand-new suspension bridge - to Ioannina in western Greece, from Tripolis to Kalamata and Sparta in the southern Peloponnese and in the narrow Vale of Tempe, in northern central Greece.

Another important project to be launched in 2005 is the long-planned undersea highway in the port of Thessaloniki, intended to alleviate the northern port city's considerable congestion problems. Work on the 6.5-kilometer road could start in September, and will take around four years to complete.

Within the first four months of 2006, a new highway is to be built in central Greece, linking Lamia with the Egnatia Highway in the north, while the road from Corinth to Patras and Pirgos in the Peloponnese will be radically improved.