Bundling state assets for sale
National Economy and Finance Minister Kostis Hatzidakis has put in place a plan for the creation of small holding companies of public interest that will be endowed with appropriately selected properties from the portfolio of the Hellenic Public Properties Company (ETAD) and will then go out to sales tenders.
In this context, tenders are under way in collaboration with the Superfund for privatizations for the mapping of 36,000 properties that are in the ETAD portfolio. Based on that, it is expected that 6,000 properties will be valued, while at the end 1,000 of them will enter the immediate maturation and utilization plan.
However, as the minister explained on Thursday from the stage of the Hellenic Public Property Conference, “there will not be 1,000 different tenders. Different packages will come out with possibly different companies for each of them in order to make the process move faster.” This is expected to cover lost time – which in some cases concerns decades – for the utilization of the large portfolio of properties in this company.
At the same time, however, the minister announced a series of actions for the properties of the General Secretariat for Public Property Management. First of all, the Real Estate Registry is being drawn up, in which all public bodies are required to register their property assets. The effort started last October and monthly conferences are taking place with representatives of all agencies.
Amendments to the legislation on occupied property currently under consultation have also been launched to make it clearer and easier to implement. For the same reason, the creation of a relevant digital platform by the Ministry of Digital Governance about the concession process of occupied properties is expected, the operation of which will begin in the summer.
Meanwhile, a special lawmaking committee is operating which is working on amendments to the law on public utility properties, with the aim of modernizing it and introducing innovative practices. This is aimed at the effective management and supervision of the capital of charitable institutions and endowments supervised by the Finance Ministry, which amounts to approximately 1.1 billion euros.
