New start pledged for land register
Effectively heralding a totally new project, the government yesterday announced changes aimed to speed up Greece’s scandal-mired efforts to compile a national land register with European Union funding. Public Works Minister Vasso Papandreou told a press conference that existing real estate registry offices would be enlisted to help the project, with the intention of having 103 offices functioning all over the country next year. Papandreou said that making real estate registry offices – whose services were hitherto only optional – an integral part of the procedure would help speed up the project while ensuring higher accuracy and reducing landowners’ appeals. According to Greece’s commitments to the EU – which last year sought the return of millions of euros already paid out for work, a fraction of which ever materialized – the first pilot program is due for completion at the end of this year, with the deadline for the second pilot program and the first main program set for the end of 2003. The first pilot program was initially supposed to have been set up in 1999. In 1997, PASOK general secretary, Costas Laliotis – who held the Public Works portfolio from 1993 until late last year – had promised that five million hectares of land would be on the register by 2000. Instead, by the beginning of this year, only 850,000 hectares had been registered. Under the new program, real estate owners will have to pay a fee of 29.3 to 880.4 euros – depending on the size and value of their property – to get preliminary titles. The final titles will only be issued 5-7 years later. Yesterday, Papandreou promised to pay debts of some 20.5 million euros to companies and experts involved in what the ruling socialists have dubbed «Greece’s biggest major public works project.»
