The death of a myth
For more than a decade, we’ve been kidding ourselves that Georgios Bobolas is a media baron with no links to the construction sector and to state contracts. But the majority of public works of the past few years have been granted to his son’s construction firm. And the general consensus was that this had nothing to do with the construction conglomerate. Of course, nobody really believed this. But it took the breakdown of negotiations with the Angelopoulos family to finally demolish the myth… Whatever the reason may be for the collapse of talks on the sale of the Pegasus group, the reality is clear. A large publishing firm is seeking a buyer, and it is not the only one. But, on a broader scale, the media sector urgently needs fresh capital, perhaps also a new direction. Most businesses in the sector that are profitable are usually surviving due to successful parallel ventures in other sectors. Newspaper publishing, as a main activity, is not an especially profitable activity. And it is easy to explain why. In Greece, the proportion of citizens who read newspapers is one of the smallest in Europe. At the same time, paradoxically, Greece is one of the countries with the largest number of publications. How can this be explained? Could it be that the purchase of a newspaper confers privileged status in the eyes of the government? Otherwise, how have all these publications managed to survive…?
