The original investigation was published in Greek on 11 April 2025 under the title “Adonis Georgiadis grants private companies access to newborns’ DNA.” This is a shorter English version of that first report, updated to include the full scope of the civil society campaign sparked by the initial exposé.

Update 21.11.2025 | Update 10.3.2026

It seemed as if Greece had stepped into a remake of ‘Gattaca’ – a world where every child’s future is predetermined by genetic analysis – infused with a hint of ‘Orphan Black’ in the veil of secrecy surrounding it.

Only this wasn’t science fiction; it was present-day reality straight out of a dystopian nightmare.

The Greek government had secretly agreed to allow two private companies full access to the DNA of newborns in Greece through a massive genomic screening project. Conspicuously missing from the project agreement: clear terms and conditions, safeguards to protect highly sensitive personal data, any requirement for parental consent, let alone revocable consent.

Compared to existing biochemical screening of newborns (five drops of blood screened for specific diseases) the difference would be huge. The secret program would introduce whole genome sequencing, an experimental technique raising significant technical and bioethical concerns.

Research data obtained from newborns’ DNA analysis would be the “exclusive property” of the private companies.

A strict confidentiality clause ensured the relevant contract was never published on the state transparency portal, Diavgeia, and that the Greek people would remain unaware that their genetic profile had been handed over to business entities.

Indeed, the genetic material of 100,000 people born in Greece risked ending up in the hands of private US-based actors, without clear terms or safeguards. This project would result in an immensely valuable genetic profile registry — something of significant interest to powerful corporations such as those in the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

The secret agreement

The 15-page Programmatic Agreement (in Greek, here) was signed on 17 May 2024 by Greece’s minister of Health Adonis Georgiadis and the companies RealGenix and Beginnings, represented by clinical geneticist Petros Tsipouras, a Greek national and permanent resident of the United States.

Both companies are registered in Greece. Real Genix is a wholly owned subsidiary of PlumcareRWE, headquartered in the US.

The agreement’s aim was to introduce universal whole-genome screening for newborns in Greece by 2029. Titled ‘First Steps’, the project was set to start in January 2025 and be conducted in two phases drawing DNA from 100,000 newborns – 25%–30% of the babies expected to be born in Greece over the five-year period of the agreement – and potentially expanding to all newborns should the program be officially adopted in the future.

The agreement explicitly stated that the research results from the sequencing of the newborns’ genomes shall “constitute property of RealGenix.” 

The agreement stated that the research findings “will be fully disconnected from the subjects’ personal data,” yet it did not specify concrete safeguards to ensure this commitment. Εven anonymised, this data, the genetic profile of a nation, would be an extremely valuable asset in the hands of the private company involved, experts said. 

The estimated cost for the sequencing, analysis, and storage of 100,000 full genomes was stated in the agreement as €56 million, which would be covered by the companies – at no cost for the Greek state. The companies would then retain “exclusive ownership of the research findings.”

According to the agreement, project financing would come “from the private sector, specifically from high-tech and innovative pharmaceutical development companies”. There were no clear clauses prohibiting commercial exploitation, data monetisation, etc.

The companies did not provide any information or guarantees on how they planned to raise the millions needed to fund this project (RealGenix and Beginnings have a cumulative initial capital of only €8.000, according to the Hellenic General Commercial Registry). In an interview (in Greek) with Reporters United, Mr Petros Tsipouras claimed that funding for the initial phase in 2025 was nearly secured through donations from charitable foundations, with no involvement from tech or pharmaceutical companies. (This statement contradicts the provisions of the agreement.) He refused to disclose further details, citing confidentiality.

By 31 March 2025, the ICH was required to provide all samples collected during the first quarter of 2025 — an estimated 20,000 (that is, all projected births in the country), in exchange for €10 per infant paid by RealGenix. 

This never happened. The ICH refused to divert blood collected for regular biochemical screening and to do so in total opacity, without parental consent.

Less than two weeks later, Reporters United and EfSyn broke the story, revealing the existence and the contents of the agreement.

The Institute of Child Health acts as guardian of newborns’ genetic data

This privatisation of newborn screening was being advanced without prior clear and valid scientific evaluation by any competent body.

Quite the contrary. The agreement was fiercely opposed by the ICH’s Scientific Council due to unresolved ethical, legal, and scientific issues. 

In its unanimous October 2024 decision, which was revealed in April 2025 by Reporters United, the Council warned that giving away three out of the five routinely collected blood spots could compromise the existing newborn screening. It outlined major flaws in First Steps, stressing that genomic screening remains under international review, with no consensus on its broad adoption. Unlike biochemical tests, DNA sequencing creates lifelong data that could be reused — for forensics, insurance, and more — posing major risks of misuse and data exploitation, the Council stated. 

You can read the ICH’s decision in full [here, in Greek].

A Health Minister acting more like a broker 

The entire initiative increasingly appeared to be the minister’s personal venture. Adonis Georgiadis signed the agreement, reportedly bypassing standard procedures within his own ministry. 

In October 2024, in a video address at the International Conference of the International Consortium on Newborn Sequencing (ICoNS), Georgiadis promoted First Steps-genomic screening as if it were an established medical practice, free of any risks or bioethical concerns. It is a “revolutionary technology providing personalised and timely care for newborns,” he said.

The minister stuck to the same line of argument after the project was exposed: “Ιf I can save even one child, I will,” he said.

He also claimed that the Supervising Committee – established by his own ministerial decision on 9 January 2025 – was the project’s ethics watchdog. However, our reporting revealed that four of the committee’s seven members were representatives of the two contracting companies, and one was appointed directly by the minister.

Lessons Greece chose to ignore

The global initiative ICoNS features a map with 13 locations in Europe, the USA, and Australia where pilot genomic screening projects are run by its “contributing partners” – including First Steps.

Seven out of the 13 ICoNS projects have not been approved by Institutional Review Boards,  research ethics bodies protecting the rights and welfare of the people recruited to participate in research studies. 

One of them is First Steps. 

Μost genomic newborn screening projects follow roadmaps and protocols approved by competent authorities. They are studies or pilot programs — none is implemented population-wide or integrated into a national health system as an approved preventive medicine program. First Steps is the only one that states it “aims to establish universal newborn genomic screening (NGS) as the standard of care within five years.”

Perhaps the most extensive such research study in Europe has been conducted in the United Kingdom. It is the Generation Study in partnership with the NHS, which started in 2023 and aims to sequence the genomes of 100,000 newborns. A very strict roadmap has been followed, including “extensive consultation with the public, parents and families affected by rare conditions as well as healthcare professionals, policy makers and scientists.” A detailed protocol was approved by the Health Research Authority, while the results will be reviewed by the NHS to “inform future decisions on using whole genome sequencing to support newborn screening.”

The specifications set by British scientists fully align with the remarks of the Scientific Council of Greece’s ICH. But none of these prerequisites have been met in the Greek First Steps program.

‘For Our Children’s DNA’: Scientific outcry 

A series of seven articles by Reporters United and Efimerida ton Syntakton, dozens of social media posts and direct exchanges with the minister sparked widespread outcry which in turn led to a civil society campaign that minister Georgiadis was unable to stop.

Scientific associations, unions and digital rights organisations issued press releases urging caution or/and calling for the cancellation of the agreement. 

On 23 May an open letter titled ‘For Our Children’s DNA’ signed by 195 leading scientists from key fields such as biology, genetics, medicine, health sciences, law, bioethics, and social sciences, as well as engaged citizens, detailed the flaws of the agreement and urged the government to cancel it. The call collected more than 4,000 signatures within a few days (the letter in English here).

Spyros Artavanis-Tsakonas, Professor Emeritus of Cell Biology at Harvard University, a signatory, held the “utterly unacceptable agreement” as evidence that “in Greece anyone can do as they please”. There is a “complete lack of understanding of scientific matters,” he lamented. Leading experts who signed the petition include Stylianos Antonarakis, John Christodoulou, Argiris Efstratiadis, Manolis Kogevinas, Elias Kouvelas, Haralampos Moutsopoulos, Charalambos Savakis, Nektarios Tavernarakis, Jan Traeger-Synodinos and others. 

Bolstering the movement’s scientific momentum, the European Society of Human Genetics (ESHG) –a non-for profit with 3,500 members, headquartered in Vienna, and a founding member of the International Federation of Human Genetics Societies– also weighed in.

The ESHG warned in a statement on 11 June that applying broad genetic testing to newborns outside a research framework is “irresponsible,” as the method’s risks and benefits remain largely unknown. The lack of transparency, they argue, “could affect the trust of the public in newborn screening and in healthcare more widely – and not just in Greece.”

Notably, despite Reporters United reaching out to all scientists reportedly involved in ‘First Steps’, not a single one responded to publicly defend the programme. The only outspoken supporters have been minister Adonis Georgiadis and the scientific lead of ‘First Steps’ Petros Tsipouras, who is also the manager of RealGenix, co-founder and CEO of its parent company Plumcare, and co-manager of Beginnings.

Professor of Computer Science at MIT Constantinos Daskalakis, who until recently appeared on Plumcare’s website as Chief Technology Officer, has now been removed from the website. Mr. Daskalakis did not respond to a question by Reporters United about this.

By the end of May, the issue had reached mainstream politics, as six opposition parties tabled questions on the matter to the Greek Parliament and the European Commission. 

The Institute of Child Health was meanwhile flooded with messages of concern from anxious parents of newborns. Some even submitted formal requests demanding the destruction of their babies’ blood samples — samples taken as part of the standard screening program designed to detect life-threatening conditions early, where swift diagnosis can mean the difference between full recovery and irreversible harm. 

In response, the Administrative Committee of the ICH issued a press release on 28 April ensuring the public they are not handing away blood samples entrusted to them unless explicit written parental consent is obtained. 

First Steps suffered further discredit when Rady Children’s Institute for Genomic Medicine (USA) and the BeginNGS Consortium denied in a statement to Reporters United any involvement in newborn screening programs in Greece. 

Plumcare, the parent company of Real Genix, had previously advertised a partnership with Rady Institute “to establish the first international site for BeginNGS (a pilot newborn genomic screening programme) in Greece.” Although talks collapsed in 2022, the supposed collaboration continued to be locally promoted in Greece in what appeared to be an attempt to bolster First Steps’ credibility.

From Soloist to Silent: The minister’s ‘Greek’ Retreat

Then came the spectacular U-turn, live on air. We were grilling Adonis Georgiadis together with radio host Yorgos Avgeropoulos in a two hour-long show when he abruptly changed tack “…it seems that we are not making any progress with this specific team… So, there’s really no point in arguing anymore,” he acknowledged.

It was May 30th, the battle had gone on for 49 days.

On 12 June, First Steps announced the termination of its agreement with the ministry of Health “by mutual consent”.

“We will remain vigilant in case there are attempts to implement this approach, possibly under a different guise,” says Takis Panagiotopoulos, Emeritus Professor at the National School of Public Health, a paediatrician – epidemiologist, and leading member of the “Initiative For Our Children’s DNA”. After his change of heart, Mr Georgiadis had invited the scientists to come up with proposals for a proper regulatory framework. Dr Panagiotopoulos says they intend to do exactly that. “We plan to initiate a public discussion among experts and the wider society on the scientific, ethical, and societal implications of using human genome sequencing” he says. “We must shed light on existing gaps in the country’s legal-ethical, research, and healthcare regulatory frameworks, and propose solutions.”

Update 21.11.2025: Strict recommendation by the Hellenic National Committee on Bioethics and Technoethics

On 21 November 2025, almost five months after Health minister Adonis Georgiadis’ (so far only verbal) disavowal of the secret Programmatic Agreement, the Hellenic National Committee on Bioethics and Technoethics issued a Recommendation “on the bioethical dimensions of neonatal genetic screening through whole-genome sequencing.” The Recommendation was issued after the Institute for Child Health (ICH) submitted the controversial agreement to the Committee for examination. Striking at the heart of the contested agreement and dismantling its problematic framework, the Recommendation marks a pivotal milestone for neonatal genetic screening, establishing a clear and binding point of reference that no actor can bypass.

Update 10.3.2026: Article published in the international journal European Journal of Human Genetics

On 10 March 2026, a scientific commentary published in the prestigious European Journal of Human Genetics raised serious ethical and clinical concerns about introducing Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) into established newborn screening programs. The commentary was prompted by our investigation, which it cites as its starting point. According to the authors Athina Ververi, Manolis Kogevinas, Takis Panagiotopoulos, Charalambos Savvakis, and Manousos Papadakis, Greece has become a cautionary case study, highlighting issues that extend beyond national borders: the blurring of lines between research and public health, inadequate preparation of health systems for genetic counseling and long-term follow-up, and the risk of commercialising genetic data at the expense of the public interest. They conclude that while genomic newborn screening may have a role in the future, its implementation must be gradual, transparent, and aligned with public health principles – otherwise, they warn, public trust in both genomic medicine and newborn screening could be undermined.

Το άρθρο DNA for sale? The untold story of Greece’s newborn screening scandal εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.

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“So many lies, so much evidence destroyed, so many questions unanswered, so many requests for evidence ignored.” 
Maria Karystianou, mother of a victim

A general strike has been called for the second anniversary of the crash, on Friday, when massive protests are expected in more than 300 locations in Greece and around the world. More than the crash itself (two trains colliding head-on, on the main Athens-Thessaloniki line, unthinkable in any other European country) what is fueling the protests are the accusations of a cover-up. Relatives of the victims fear that the government and Ferrovie dello Stato are working hand in hand in order to conceal the real cause of the fire. 

Two years of cover-up by the Greek government

Polls show that more than 70% of the people believe there is a cover-up and this includes government supporters. “So many lies, so much evidence destroyed, so many questions unanswered, so many requests for evidence ignored” Maria Karystianou, a paediatrician from Thessaloniki, whose 20-year-old daughter Marthi was burned to death as she returned home from carnival, tells Reporters United and Il Fatto. “For two years those who are responsible have been trying to silence our struggle”. Karystianou has become an iconic figure of this struggle.  

Immediately after the crash, instead of cordoning off the site, the Greek authorities ordered a complete clean up of the area. The debris was removed, even the soil was dug up and trucked away without any search for human remains and passengers’ belongings. This was against all established rules for dealing with accident scenes, even those with far fewer victims, but in line with what would have happened if the aim had been to destroy evidence of the flammable material. 

Christos Triantopoulos, deputy minister to the prime minister at the time, coordinated the operation. On March 5th, the Greek parliament will decide whether he will face a parliamentary inquiry. Officials, including the head of the regional government have been charged with tampering with the accident scene. 

At the time, Greece had no specialised body investigating railway accidents. It has since been created and its members said today (February 27) during a press conference (live streamed and closely followed by millions across Greece) presenting the findings of their report  that “everything was done in the wrong way”.They cannot say whether this was done on purpose or whether the authorities handled the situation “to the best of their abilities and knowledge, which was clearly insufficient”.  

“Unknown fuel”

In early 2024, the then CEO of Hellenic Τrain Maurizio Capotorto testified in the Greek Parliament that there was no undeclared cargo on the freight train, only metal sheets, food and other goods as described in the accompanying documents. Mr Capotorto, who has since left his post, is now being investigated by the Athens court of first instance on suspicion of lying under oath. (It is not clear which part of his testimony is the focus of the judicial investigation.)

“Τhe explosion that followed the collision was most likely due to the arc flashes and short circuit of the catenary.”
Hellenic Train spokesperson

The initial official explanation for the 80-meter diameter 12-second fireball, and for the pool fires that burned for hours on the ground was that the cooling oil in the locomotives’ transformers was vaporised and caught fire. But specialised analysis called Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), a method that looks at the size and duration of a fire and compares it with the known properties of different flammable materials, has concluded that oil used for cooling can cause no such thing.  CFD analysis verified by the University of Ghent and other researchers points to several tons of hydrocarbons, raising questions as to where they could have been placed, who would have an interest in transporting them in a clandestine manner and why. The railway accident investigation authority report, based on this analysis, points to “unknown fuel.”

“Hellenic Train has not yet had the opportunity to review the specific CFD analysis and therefore cannot confirm its reliability,” the company told Reporters United and Il Fatto, pointing instead to a report authored by its Belgian consultant Yves Carton, which blamed the fire on a series of short circuits. “Τhe explosion that followed the collision was most likely due to the arc flashes and short circuit of the catenary, that happened very close to or on the transformer, with eventually additional short circuits of the capacitors, creating an ignition and explosion of the refrigerant fluid which then burned out (2.4 ton) till the end,” the company told Reporters United. (Full company answers here.) 

Χylene, illicit cargo, Greek mafia 

Still, chemical analysis ordered by the families of the dead in the interior of a partly incinerated carriage revealed high concentrations of xylene and other hydrocarbons. Researchers linked to the families say that in cases of fuel fires, such as this one, not all the fuel is burned, some of it is sprayed around the area, including the inside of the passenger train. “Hellenic Train has likewise not yet had access to this chemical analysis and cannot verify its accuracy. To gather further evidence, the company has commissioned additional expert reports on the causes of the fire, with the aim of confirming or challenging the findings so far,” the company said.

Xylene and similar substances, known as solvents, are much cheaper than petrol and are systematically used for fuel adulteration, a highly lucrative business for mafia-type organisations. The authorities estimate that fuel smuggling and fuel adulteration business cost 1 billion euros a year in lost state revenue, and has doubled in the last decade. 

The main entry point of those solvents into Greece is Bulgaria and they mostly make their way south to the Athens area. Dozens of mafia-related murders in recent years have been linked to the fuel adulteration business. The Greek government is asking the people to trust the court to shed light on what really happened in Tempi – but it seems that the people are sceptical. 

 “If it is proven beyond any doubt that the train was carrying dangerous cargo, Hellenic Train will need to face judicial but also political consequences.”
Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greek prime minister

On January 26^th, huge crowds gathered in squares across Greece demanding accountability. The size and the spontaneity of the protests took the government by surprise – no opposition party could possibly take credit for them, so it was impossible to downplay them in the usual way governments do with opposition led protests.  

After two days of silence, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis went on television and said that “the unthinkable is now possible”, putting the blame on Hellenic Train. “If it is proven beyond any doubt that the train was carrying dangerous cargo, Hellenic Train will have to face legal but also political consequences” the Greek prime minister said. 

Videosurveillance footage from 40 cameras “accidentally” lost

But in reality, the government and Hellenic Train are joined at the hip. It was the state-owned OSE company, the network operator, which was responsible for the video surveillance of the line and which somehow allowed footage from all 40 cameras in 15 locations filming the freight train to disappear. Until a few weeks ago, the judicial investigation had found full video coverage of the passenger train at every stop and zero footage of the freight train. Two years later, after the huge outcry, a handful of videos of the freight train have emerged, showing nothing irregular, but their authenticity is disputed. 

The issue is affecting relations between Italy and Greece. The meeting scheduled for February 19^th between Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, at which Hellenic Train’s role on the train crash was on the agenda, was reportedly cancelled at the request of the Italian side. In the major trial, which is still in the preparatory phase, the former CEO and the head of safety of Hellenic Train are prosecuted for the misdemeanours of manslaughter through negligence, grievous bodily harm through negligence and simple bodily harm through negligence for failures related to the operation of the GSM-R communication system on trains. 

A request by the victims’ relatives for the charges to be upgraded to felonies, as is the case for most of the 40 or so defendants, has just been rejected. 

The bill for Italian taxpayers is still unknown. A recent court ruling in Athens found Hellenic Hellenic Train partly responsible for the crash and accepted the first victim’s claim for financial compensation. 

An Italian version of this article was published by Il Fatto Quotidiano.

Το άρθρο Tempi train crash: Mitsotakis government and Italian state-owned train operator at centre of alleged cover-up εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.

Using advanced data collection and analysis methods, Reporters United tracked the intricacies of the Pillar, a non-performing loans (NPLs) portfolio from Greek bank Eurobank. The investigation was guided by information from the portfolio’s prospectus, dated October 10, 2019, available on the Central Bank of Ireland’s website.

We followed the complex money trail across five corporate groups and 19 corporate structures surrounding the Pillar, headquartered in five countries, including tax havens. Ultimately, the core of this massive web of interrelated ownerships was reached – a core which constantly shifts over time like quicksand, with continuous trading of loans and bonds among them.

This year-long investigation led to crucial conclusions about this exchange, where the identity of owners, shareholders, management, and the business risk-bearing entity disappears in a thick fog of top-level creative accounting. 

The goals: tax avoidance, maximising benefits from the “Hercules” securitisation scheme of the Greek state at the expense of the latter, intransparency as to profits and losses, evasion of accountability by companies known to the public –and thus subject to scrutiny– plus obscuring the fact that the fund/company which auctions off people’s properties often becomes the highest bidder and subsequent owner of these properties.

Ultimately, the entire scheme is shown to be meticulously constructed in favour of creditors, and almost always to the detriment of vulnerable borrowers.

The Pillar portfolio consists mainly of mortgage loans valued at approximately €2 billion, originated by Eurobank Ergasias S.A. or by banks acquired by the Eurobank Group. Eurobank is among the four systemic Greek banks. These loans are “secured over (in the majority of cases) residential or other real estate properties located in Greece,” as stated in the prospectus (page 1).

Why does Greece have the highest rate of NPLs in the EU?

In 2019, non-performing residential mortgage loans in Greece accounted for a staggering 44.7% of the country’s GDP, that is €75.4 billion as of June 2019. In 2010 they accounted for 10.3% of the GDP. 

But how did Greek banks, including Eurobank, end up with such a mountain of NPLs that have now to a great extent been securitised and sold to funds, resulting in borrowers massively losing their properties?

The story starts back in the 90s, when the residential mortgage market in Greece was rapidly deregulated. As Greece joined the Eurozone in 2000, the country’s credit rating improved and interest rates decreased significantly to the EU average. Consequently, bank lending skyrocketed. Thus, from 1999 to 2009, mortgage loans increased from 5.8% to 33.9% of the GDP. At the end of 2008, they accounted for most of the total household bank debt (€79.14 billion out of 118.47 billion in 2009). 

Τhis staggering increase led to uncontrollable levels of debt for the Greek economy, which intersected with the fiscal deadlocks of the Greek state at the end of the decade, studies suggest.

Then, the financial crisis erupted. In 2010, financial rating agencies stamped Greek bonds as “junk.” To avoid default, Greece resorted to the IMF for a bailout, which was received on tremendous austerity terms. 

This austerity created deep, and still open scars. Between 2008 and 2013, the Greek GDP declined by nearly 25%. As fiscal adjustment was largely enforced through increased tax burdens, households’ disposable income decreased by about a third. Unemployment skyrocketed from 7% in 2008 to over 27% in 2013, and poverty to 44.3% in 2013 if measured in terms of real purchasing power. “Such a dramatic deterioration in living conditions over such a short period has not been experienced by any OECD-developed country during the post-war period,” research institute Dianeosis noted in a report. 

Under these conditions, Greek borrowers increasingly struggled to repay their loans. Non-performing residential mortgage loans quadrupled within nine years.

In this context, the Hercules scheme was launched in 2019, aiming at assisting banks in securitising NPLs and moving them off their balance-sheets. After converting NPLs into securities, banks sell them to investors through a special entity created for this purpose.

As Reporters United documented in a previous report, Hercules was followed by a sharp increase in foreclosures from 2021 onwards. Credit Servicing Firms (henceforth ‘Servicers’ – companies responsible for the daily management of securitised loans) played a vital role in this, as Greece’s Supreme Court decided they can carry out auctions on behalf of funds. Plus, the so-called ‘Katselis’s Law,’ which exempted the borrower’s primary residence from liquidation, was gradually eroded over the crisis years. The New Bankruptcy Code, enacted in 2020, dealt the final blow to it. Indebted citizens can now lose their only home to funds. 

Since its 2019 launch, the cumulative state guarantees from three expansions of the Hercules program are estimated at nearly €23 billion. This support has resulted in a reduction of the banks’ NPLs from 40.6% in December 2019 to just above 5% by September 2024. Meanwhile, in March 2023, Eurostat decided that the state guarantees under Hercules I & II, which have not yet been triggered, would not be added to public debt.

The Pillar web

Let us now go through the complex web surrounding Eurobank’s Pillar portfolio.

On June 18, 2019, Pillar Finance Designated Company (Pillar Finance DAC) issued the entire bond portfolio for Pillar (prospectus, p. 1). The notes are listed on the main securities market of Euronext Dublin, which is the primary Irish stock exchange, supervised by the Central Bank of Ireland.

Pillar Finance DAC is a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV), established by Wilmington Trust SP (Dublin) Limited in Ireland on 16 February 2018, and headquartered in Dublin. It serves as the core entity in the transactional operations around the Pillar portfolio by issuing the bonds and assigning various roles within the intricate structure.

Through the Hercules scheme, the Greek state has guaranteed the repayment to Class A noteholders (see below) up to €19.2 billion if the amount collected from auctions and other settlements is insufficient. These guarantees are the “big incentive” for funds to buy loans from Greek banks, as noted by Professor Emilios Avgouleas, an expert in International Banking Law and Finance at the University of Edinburgh, in an interview with Reporters United. For this guarantee, the state collects a fee as per market standards.

On the first day of issuance, Eurobank purchased 100% of the notes across all classes, including their initial capital – that is, Class A (Senior), Class B (Mezzanine), and Class C (Junior) Notes (for the initial principal balance of each class, see prospectus, p. 1).

Class A Notes come with privileges as they are prioritised for repayment and carry the lowest risk and interest rate. Class B Notes have a higher risk and interest rate, while Class C Notes carry the highest risk and interest rate.

In September 2019, the global investment management firm Pimco headquartered in California (USA) and managing some $2 trillion in assets- through its subsidiary Celidoria, acquired from Eurobank, for €102.5 million, 95% of the mezzanine and junior notes of the Pillar securitisation NPLs. Eurobank retained 5% of these notes and 100% of the senior ones.

By selling the largest share of mezzanine and junior notes, the corresponding ‘bad debt’ is removed from a bank’s balance sheet, studies highlight – and their finances appear healthier. This is, after all, the purpose of Hercules. According to Eurobank’s financial statements, upon completion of this transaction, Eurobank Holdings “ceased to control the SPV” and “de-recognized the underlying loan portfolio in its entirety, on the basis that it transferred substantially all risk and rewards of the underlying loan portfolio’s ownership.”

The following diagram illustrates how the web of companies surrounding the Pillar portfolio branches out:

Let us now look more closely into two companies-main players in this report:

>Eurobank FPS Loans and Credits Claim Management S.A., a Eurobank subsidiary, which was the initial servicer. In 2020, it was acquired by –and merged with– doValue, Italian leader servicer in Southern Europe and one of the bad loans’ Big-4 in Greece which acted as the servicer until May 16, 2023, when it was replaced by QQuant, also one of the Big-4.

The main responsibility of the servicer is to manage the loans, conduct portfolio sales and auctions, and provide related services. The servicing of the portfolio by the servicer can be terminated by the issuer (Pillar Finance DAC) and by the security trustee (in this case, Citibank N.A., London Branch).

QQuant is the fourth largest NPL management company in Greece and part of the Qualco group, whose major shareholder is Pimco. It is noted that Pimco, through its subsidiary Celidoria has purchased 95% of the Class B and C Notes – meaning that the same company currently controlling the Pillar portfolio (Pimco via Celidoria) also controls the Pillar servicer (QQuant) through a company of the group in which group it is a major shareholder (Qualco).

>Pillar Estate Single Member S.A. (Pillar Estate), which is a Real Estate Owned Company – henceforth, REOCo. REOCos are established as limited-purpose entities, whose main activities are to acquire and manage real estate assets either already included in the securitised portfolio or expected to be repossessed, according to S&P Global. 

When the institution managing the loan, for example the servicer, cannot sell a default property in a short sale or at an auction, the property becomes Real Estate Owned (REO), meaning it is now owned by the creditor/servicer. For this reason, REO assets are also referred to as “bank-owned homes.”

Pillar Estate (the REOCo) was established on June 7, 2019, just eleven days before the Pillar portfolio notes were issued by Pillar Finance DAC. The initial share capital of Pillar Estate was €25,000. Its purpose is to operate in the real estate market. Eurobank Ergasias Services and Holdings SA (Eurobank Holdings) is its sole shareholder owning 100% of its shares. However, according to Pillar Estate financial statements, Eurobank Holdings, “can no longer influence the core activities of Pillar Estate, precisely because of the sale of 95% of the mezzanine and junior notes of Pillar Finance DAC to Celidoria SARL, an entity controlled by the global investment management company Pimco.”

Headquarters in Ireland, assets in Greece

It is common for SPVs to choose a “friendly tax residence” as advertised in the prospectus (p. 51). They often chose this tax residence to be in Ireland. According to Professor Augouleas, SPVs are created primarily “for reasons of bankruptcy remoteness, meaning that should there be claims from fund creditors, they would not be directed towards the fund but towards the SPV, which has its own legal personality and it is supposed to be independent from the fund… This is an old technique; it wasn’t created exclusively for Greece. It was widely used in the US before the recent crisis,” explains the professor. However, “sometimes the SPV is created also for tax evasion purposes.”

Why is the SPV not taxed in Greece? Because, according to Professor Avgouleas, “it is very difficult to prove that the actual headquarters of the fund’s operations is in Greece.” SPVs are part of the shadow banking system, which operates legally. Nevertheless, “we have credit flows that may create investment bubbles and systemic risk along the way, under the very nose of the supervisory authorities.” The shadow banking system preexisted; “that’s why Lehman Brothers collapsed, for example.”

Nikos Stravelakis, economist and visiting lecturer at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, highlights the fact that loan buyers refuse a Greek tax ID as “they try to avoid paying tax on their potential profits.”

Maintaining a tax residence outside Greece means that the revenues of these companies in Greece end up being taxed where the companies maintain a tax residence – in this case, in Ireland. They therefore bolster the Irish economy as, even if tax there is minimal or null, they create ‘development.’

The sums of money offshored are enormous: The total value of the loans being managed by the servicers at the end of the second quarter of 2024 was €69.7 billion, according to the Bank of Greece (BoG’s latest Financial Stability reports in English here). Of these, mortgage loans amounted to circa €21.9 billion.

We discovered the winner of the auctions!

The Pillar portfolio in its initial composition involved 33,477 borrowers, individuals and legal entities. Each borrower has an average debt of €60,000. The total gross value of the portfolio, that is the total sum of the initial loans it includes, is €2 billion (€1,999,434,406.89).The lion’s share (50%) of the property value, corresponding to 40.7% of the portfolio’s loans, is located in the greater Athens area. 

We collected and analysed data from the official electronic auction platform of the Greek state, eauction.gr, from March 2019 to January 2024 – for the entire country. Then, we singled out and analysed all entries related to the Pillar portfolio.

During the aforementioned period, 4,820 auctions were conducted by doValue, QQuant, and Eurobank. Of these, 3,099 pertain to unique properties. In other words, the mortgaged properties that have gone up for auction are 3,099, though some of them were auctioned more than once, which is why the total number of auctions is higher.

The vast majority of auctioned properties from the Pillar portfolio are residential, smaller than 90 square metres, over 40 years old, and mostly located in Attica. More specifically, their average size is 80 square metres, and their average age is 42 years.

After analysing these data, one last, and most difficult, step remained: 

To discover into whose hands the properties of struggling households are ending up.

We completed this final mile of the investigation by cross-referencing each auctioned property in the Pillar portfolio in the last five years with the only database that provides the necessary information in most cases: the Hellenic Land Registry. 

The result was revealing.

Property auctions: Eurobank parties. Drinks are on Pillar

From the 3,099 properties in the Pillar portfolio, 405 (13%) were transferred to new owners. In other words, the auction was successfully completed, and the property changed hands.

Reporters United investigation into the Hellenic Land Registry identified detailed ownership data (name and tax identification number of the new owner, purchase date, etc.) for 243 of the 405 properties that changed hands. For the remaining 162 properties, information could not be found, either because they were not listed in the Land Registry (it is not yet completed in Greece) or due to incorrect registration codes listed in e-auction.gr.

In response to a related question by Reporters United, Eurobank ultimately confirmed that a larger number of horizontal properties (426) changed hands compared to the number identified in our investigation (405), which may be due to the fact that Reporters United stopped collecting data in January 2024 – while the bank’s data extended from March 2019 to March 2024 (All Eurobank responses can be found here – in Greek.)

What Reporters United discovered, however, is that the largest buyer is Pillar Estate, which acquired 41 of these properties, that is 1/6 of the total – twenty seven of them, residential. It remains unclear whether and how it acquired some (if any) of the remaining 162 properties, as relevant data were not found.

The vast majority of these properties (34 out of 41) were auctioned only once, meaning that Pillar acquired them the first time they were auctioned. Five of the 41 properties were auctioned twice, while two were auctioned four times before being ultimately purchased by Pillar.

For 37 of the 41 properties purchased, Pillar Estate bid just one euro above the starting price in the auction, and for one property, just €1.67 above the starting price. These data confirm Reportes United information -obtained by a citizens’ movement against auctions- that if a property is awarded at the starting price, or just above it, it has been acquired by the bank or the fund-NPLs investor who are holding it as collateral.

For the remaining three properties, the hammer price is not available because they were auctioned earlier, when the award amount was not listed on the platform.

In their replies to Reporters United, Eurobank called upon its latest data to clarify that Pillar Estate has bought 62 of the auctioned properties (All Eurobank replies, here – in Greek). The bank claimed that Pillar acquired them “because there was no demand from third-party buyers at that time.” 

Eurobank verified a higher number of properties ending up with Pillar Estate than the number our investigation had detected (62 instead of 41), which could be because we managed to collect information for only 243 out of 405 properties for reasons explained earlier. 

We also sent questions to the Bank of Greece (BoG). Their responses were rather vague for most of the queries. For example, they responded that “specific measures are taken to prevent conflict of interest during the management of NPLs and the disposal of properties.” (All BoG here – in Greek.)

The Ministry of Finance and QQuant did not respond to our questions. 

The fact that Eurobank saw fit to respond, while QQuant conspicuously ignored us, confirms our investigation’s finding that a main objective of this complex structure is to shift the “political” risk of property disposals onto entities that are not susceptible to social pressure. Through Reporters United investigation and questions, the pressure was redirected where it should have been applied in the first place.

Eurobank: An owner without property 

A number of properties were acquired by Pillar Estate. That’s a fact. 

But who is really behind this company? In other words, who now owns these properties?

As mentioned earlier, Pillar Estate (the REOCo) was established on 7 June 2019, with an initial capital of €25,000 and the purpose of engaging in the real estate market. The company’s shares are 100% owned by Eurobank Ergasias Services and Holdings S.A.— Eurobank Holdings.

At this point, a telling ‘detail’ arises: According to the financial statements of Pillar Estate, “Eurobank Holdings cannot, however, influence the core activities of the company. The reason is that in September 2019, the sale of 95% of the mezzanine and junior notes of Pillar Finance DAC was completed to Celidoria SARL, an entity controlled by the global investment management firm Pimco.” It further adds: “Upon completion of the transaction in September 2019, Eurobank Group ceased to control the company and stopped consolidating it [note: consolidation of financial statements is the accounting method by which the financial statements of a parent company and its subsidiaries are presented as if they were one entity. They are presented as one by integrating the assets, revenues, expenses, and cash flows of the respective consolidated companies into the parent company’s financial statements], transferring all benefits and risks to Celidoria SARL, as Eurobank Group no longer holds any voting rights or contractual rights which would enable it to direct the relevant investor’s operations.

The Eurobank Group cannot exercise control over the REO Servicer, who makes all critical operational decisions for the Company regarding the conduct of its activities, nor can it influence the company’s plans and policies that shape its cash flows.”

Simply put, it is stated that Eurobank Holdings, although the sole shareholder of Pillar Estate, and despite the fact that the group continues to hold the Class A Notes of the Pillar portfolio, does not control the company that was established to acquire Pillar properties through auctions.

This raises a critical question with interesting implications: How is it possible for Pillar Estate to be controlled by Celidoria-Pimco while being a sister company of Eurobank, and Eurobank Holdings is its sole shareholder?

Note that, while the Hercules scheme is based on distancing the creditor bank from non-performing loans and the fate of the properties, in their aforementioned replies to Reporters United, the bank does not claim it is no longer related to these properties—and thus the profits or losses resulting from their auctions—but instead provides information about their status, implicitly acknowledging its involvement. It is also noteworthy that in their replies, the bank refers to itself as a “senior noteholder,” indicating its continued connection to the entire arrangement. This confirms our investigation’s conclusion that the bank enjoys all privileges stemming from this “distancing” through a nominal structure that allows it to retain the umbilical cord and benefit from the distribution of capital gains that arise by having set itself in advantageous position.

Because all this amounted somehow to higher mathematics, Reporters United had to turn again to the insights of Nikos Stravelakis. “It’s an entire game where all the banks try to somehow separate management from control. Since junior notes might have been sold at a very low price, to avoid recording the loss, they conducted an accounting maneuver: the bank does not appear as the seller of the loans; instead, a holding company that is the bank’s parent [i.e., Eurobank Holdings, which is listed on the Athens Stock Exchange] appears as the seller. This way, any loss is passed on to the holding company, and the bank’s capital adequacy is not affected.”

Step 1: Setting up a chain of companies

The junior notes with an initial principal balance of €645,398,000 were issued by Pillar Finance DAC at €1 (prospectus, p. 1), in June 2019.

In 2020, Eurobank Ergasias S.A. was renamed Eurobank Holdings while at the same time a new corporate entity was created, Eurobank S.A., a 100% subsidiary of Eurobank Holdings. According to its website, Eurobank Holdings retains operations and assets that are not related to the main banking activity, but rather focus on the strategic planning of NPLs management and the provision of services to the group’s subsidiaries and third parties.

They have also performed a second accounting maneuver, however, according to Mr. Stravelakis: “By using a very refined provision of international accounting standards, which states that if I don’t have control, I don’t have to consolidate [the financial statements of the subsidiary with the parent company], they stopped consolidating the company within Holdings. This way, if they sold the loans to Pimco for peanuts, they don’t record the loss because they no longer consolidate the company. Therefore, they retain a participation that is worth 100, which they display at its acquisition value of 100, without showing the changes in the company’s net worth, meaning the company’s equity. Essentially, this way, they might be hiding losses.”

“The third issue is that Eurobank remains a shareholder. This means they transferred the assets and remained a shareholder without recording the results of this trade! Neither the profit nor the loss.”

Mr. Stravelakis believes that this could all be happening “to cover up the fact that the entity auctioning the property is also the highest bidder!”

Thus, “if tomorrow morning I put your house on auction and buy it for a pittance, I’m not to blame; Pimco or whoever is managing Pillar is. Because I no longer make any decisions — I’m an innocent party, a third party. Of course, there’s one small detail: all the shares are still mine. Also, I might record profits or losses, but I didn’t make the decisions.”

Ultimately, if Eurobank Holdings were to conventionally transfer all of Pillar Estate’s shareholder rights (but not the shares) to Celidoria, then why go through the process of establishing the company in the first place, if not for the reason described by Mr. Stravelakis?

Step 2: Fudging profits and losses

Meanwhile, Pillar Estate appears to be operating at a loss. According to its financial statements, the company’s net pre-tax results in 2021 showed losses of €657,822. In 2020, the losses were €361,482.

By 2021, its total equity (its net worth after subtracting loans and liabilities) was negative, by €1,026,548. In 2020, it was also negative, by €358,396.

How is it possible for a company with an initial share capital of just €25,000 to have purchased (at least) 41 properties according to our research, 62 according to Eurobank’s responses, within just four and a half years after its establishment, while recording such significant and growing losses in both its net results and equity? Shouldn’t it have gone bankrupt?

Step 3: Questionable borrowing

According to its 2021 financial statements, the company “does not face liquidity problems because, with the Bond Loan it has secured, it can cover, among other things, all general expenses related to its operations, as well as its obligations towards the Greek state and all its suppliers.”

The total Bond Loan amounted to €23,000,000, with €6,735,000 disbursed by April 20, 2023.

Who would lend such an enormous amount to a company with an initial capital of €25,000 that is also recording losses and negative equity? “No normal lender,” concludes Mr. Stravelakis.

In the Pillar prospectus (p. 194), it was noted that the REOCo “will use the proceeds from the REOCo Bond Loans to (a) bid for a Property at auctions or purchase a Property as part of an Amicable Settlement…”

In Pillar Estate 2021 financial statements, it is mentioned that when the company “requests any amount under the Bond Loan, Pillar Finance DAC is obliged to transfer the corresponding amount to the lending bank (‘Eurobank’ or ‘the Bank’) so that the latter can disburse it to the company (…) The Bond Loan is not financed by the Bank but by the Reserve Account registered with Pillar Finance DAC.”

However, Pillar Finance DAC has sold 100% of the Pillar portfolio notes to Eurobank and Celidoria-Pimco. So, by whom and why is the “Reserve Account” funded?

“What does ‘Reserve Account’ even mean?” Mr. Stravelakis wonders. “It’s all legal dribbling in order to hide behind grandiose terms what’s really happening… They’ve set up 3-4 companies, so that the market would become ‘internal.’ It’s a network of transactions through which they essentially aim to take possession of people’s properties. If there’s profit, they won’t pay tax, but if there’s a loss, we’ll pay for it.”

Who, then, granted the loan? 

In the 2019 financial statements of Irish-based Pillar Finance DAC (p. 2), it is stated: “Eurobank Ergasias S.A., as Loans and REOCo Bond Provider, granted to the Company a Loan and REOCO Bonds Receivable and the proceeds of the Loans are used to fund the Cash Reserve established and maintained on the Cash Reserve Account.”

This means that Eurobank has lent to the subsidiary it no longer consolidates, says Mr. Stravelakis. He emphasises that “if Eurobank granted a loan to itself, it must explain the purpose of this transaction, given that it runs a double risk on these loans, and this is in direct contradiction to the goals of the Hercules program. Because the purpose of Hercules, at least its declared one, was that ‘the banks would sell some securitised loans, and the risk for collecting these loans and paying interest to third parties would be borne by others.’ That is, the risk would permanently and irrevocably be removed from Greek banks.”

Furthermore, international financial regulations stipulate that “when the parent company grant a loan to any subsidiary or associated company (Eurobank Holdings is still connected to Pillar Estate as it holds 100% of its shares), it must have prepared a Transfer Pricing Report, which documents that it provided the loan under the same terms any other lender would have done,” notes Mr. Stravelakis. This is apparently to ensure competition is not distorted.

Reporters United asked Eurobank if it had prepared a Transfer Pricing report. The bank insisted that “it has already been explained in detail that Pillar Estate is not a connected company” and claimed that there is no transfer pricing obligation because the account balance is currently zero. (The full second response from Eurobank is here, in Greek).

To sum up the course of events:

Eurobank Holdings establishes Pillar Estate.

Then, Eurobank Holdings provides a significant loan to the loss-making Pillar Estate, without considering transfer pricing as an issue and without preparing a relevant report.

Finally, it stops consolidating it.

And then, through these accounting maneuvers and internal lending, Pillar Estate acquires a large number of the auctioned properties at prices lower than the market value (effectively setting desirable prices that the market cannot influence—“market cornering”). If the properties are resold, it pockets the capital gains.

Readers can make their own conclusions.

Step 4: Maximising capital gains

How does Pillar Estate, and thus the companies behind it, maximise capital gains? If a mortgaged house is worth €1 million and the debtor owes €200,000, the house will be auctioned for €200,000, maybe a little more, but then the bank or fund will sell it at its market value, which is a million.

The only rational explanation, according to Mr. Stravelakis, is that Eurobank and Pimco created this corporate structure to extract capital gains from the senior tranche properties.

And why didn’t then Pimco buy the senior tranche notes, which are secured? “Probably because it cannot know in advance whether the nominal value of the guarantees [provided by the Greek State] will be at 100% or 65% of the estimated value of the properties,” Mr. Stravelakis assesses, as the debtor might have to repay more creditors. 

“However, the lender [of Pillar Estate] has a huge advantage in the definitive and full acquisition of the properties.” On the other hand, Eurobank “appears to have transferred the loans (concealing the risk it assumes), while by pledging Pillar Estate shares, it transfers voting rights and does not consolidate. Thus, Eurobank conceals that it is buying itself part of the collateral-properties it is auctioning.”

Step 5: Pledging of Shares

Mr. Stravelakis believes that Eurobank may have pledged shares of Pillar Estate, transferring voting rights. “However, the company holding the shares as collateral may release the voting rights at the General Assembly, as it has happened in other cases in the past.”

“Overall, it is a non-transparent agreement that obscures who bears the risk of the notes issued in relation to the non-performing loans,” Mr. Stravelakis concludes. In addition, Eurobank has retained the Class A Notes (Eurobank Holdings recognised them on its balance sheet, and in March 2020 they were transferred, ‘among others,’ to Eurobank), thus the bank also takes on their risk.

“This is significant because we do not know if and to what extent the Greek state guarantees are involved. Finally, there is also a tax issue: Who and where will be taxed for any capital gains on Pillar Estate properties?” Mr. Stravelakis concludes.

And who else but the Greek people will be called to recapitalise Eurobank (all four systemic banks have been repeatedly recapitalised by the state during the crisis) if this substantial part of the risk materialises?

Reporters United report caused rifts within Greece’s ruling party

Less than three months after our publication, eleven lawmakers of ruling New Democracy (ND) tabled a parliamentary question on non-performing loans. In a highly unusual move, they emphasised that securitising NPLs and transferring them to funds improved the banks’ balance sheets, but left borrowers unprotected.

The lawmakers called upon the complex web of companies as documented for the first time in Greece in our report, without however explicitly naming the report or Reporters United. They emphasised that “another practice was recently reported and documented.” The fund that purchased the loan puts the borrower’s property up for auction. “The property is acquired at auction by a real estate company with an identical name to the fund that purchased [i.e. securitised] the loan, while [this real estate company is] a single-member S.A. company with sole shareholder the bank which transferred the loan. This way, the bank secures the fund’s profits, which are not taxed in Greece.”

Five days later, ND expelled from its parliamentary group their MP Marios Salmas. Salmas claimed he was expelled mainly because he co-signed this question.

Research Methodology

This is step by step how Reporters United retrieved and managed data that informed this investigation on Eurobank’s Pillar portfolio.

The research began with the 270-page prospectus of Pillar Finance DAC, obtained from the Central Bank of Ireland website. This document offered crucial insights into the portfolio’s structure and the network of companies involved. To further understand the transactions, we built our own databases by integrating information from various sources.

Next, we collected data on auctioned properties linked to the Pillar portfolio from eauction.gr, cross-referencing these with press reports, Hellenic Land Registry records, financial statements, and interviews. We created structured datasets that formed the basis for our reports.

Decoding the Pillar prospectus and transactions

The Pillar Finance DAC prospectus detailed the issuance of €2 billion in bonds, with payments tied to real estate-secured non-performing loans in Greece. The document also included graphical representations of transaction structures and cash flows, which helped us visualise the relationships between companies involved.

To enhance our understanding, we manually sketched diagrams to identify patterns, which eventually led to the creation of a final digital visualisation.

Data retrieval and analysis from eauction.gr

Reportes United compiled a dataset covering 3,099 auctioned properties between March 12, 2019, and January 13, 2024, using data from eauction.gr. This dataset included auction details such as starting bids, property addresses, and auction award prices. For half of these properties, auction award prices were only marginally higher than initial bids, raising concerns about the auction process.

We used Python and tools like Apache Tika to extract property data and created three datasets: auction details, reports, and property characteristics. These were cleaned using Pandas, Regular Expressions, and OpenRefine.

Mapping the auctioned properties

Using QGIS, we mapped the auctioned properties based on geographic coordinates and categorised them by use (e.g., residential, business). This interactive map was further enhanced with Mapbox, allowing for spatial analysis of property distribution, use, and starting bid prices.

Hellenic Land Registry search: Who is buying the properties?

As eauction.gr does not disclose buyers, Reporters United used the Hellenic Land Registry to identify the buyers of 405 auctioned Pillar properties. We found 41 of the 243 located properties were purchased by Pillar Estate Single Member S.A., though this number may be higher due to incomplete data.

We categorised the buyers into natural and legal persons, focusing on entities like Pillar, Eurobank, and other real estate/investment companies.

Transparency and accessibility

We aim to make Reporters United journalistic investigations transparent and accessible by publishing our data and methodology. This open-access approach supports wider participation in data-driven journalism.

This is the English version of two Reporters United reports, which were originally published in Greek on 27 June and 2 July 2024. This version has been adopted for international readers. It is also shorter than the original reports and updated.   

The report is part of the Ghost Debts investigation by the Urban Journalism Network, a cross-border project involving reporters, data journalists, and visualisation experts covering one of the most pressing issues faced by European cities: housing crisis.

The research was funded by Stars4Media and Journalismfund Europe.

Το άρθρο Minotaur captured: How a Greek bank and international funds, through a labyrinth of companies, seized people’s homes εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.

Derailed 
Even though the EU has declared 2021 the ‘Year of Rail’, Europe’s railways are more a patchwork than a network. EU countries still invest significantly more money in road than rail, despite the urgent need for more climate-friendly transportation. The cross-border investigation by Investigate Europe and Reporters United.

The horrific head-on train collision in Greece last week, with a provisional death toll of 57, was a disaster waiting to happen. 

Late in the evening on 28 February, nobody noticed a passenger train and freight train racing towards each other, on the same track near Tempi, in central Greece, for an entire 12 minutes. The Larissa station master, who made the fatal mistake, is a 59-year-old former porter who received training last year. He had limited help from a partially functioning control system that only revealed the location of trains around Larissa, but went blind once they ventured a few kilometres out of the city. 

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As the country is consumed by grief and rage of unseen proportions, with protests taking place nationwide, there is a European dimension to the question: how could such a tragedy occur?

Staffing levels at the Greek railways are well below those required for the safe operation of the network. Also, the split between rail and passenger services, a precondition for privatisation, has led to a breakdown of security coordination. The first is a direct consequence of the policies imposed on the country by its EU creditors since 2010. The second stems from the EU Commission’s insistence on the separation of track and rail operations. 

The companies running the railways and implementing safety upgrades are not Greek. The fully privatised passenger rail company belongs to Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato group. The firm tasked with installing a new automated signalling system from Athens to the northern border, meant to be delivered by 2016 but still not in operation, is France’s Alstom. Experts are adamant that if this system was in place, the devastating crash wouldn’t have happened.

New research by Reporters United and Investigate Europe reveals that the consortium in charge of the signalling project – Alstom, and Aktor, a major Greek construction company – was, for years, violating the terms of the contract. Oversight by Ergose, the public company responsible for the network, has been suspiciously lax. 

Both companies are multinationals with a controversial record on public contracts. 

Aktor was nicknamed the “national contractor” due to its disproportionate share of state contracts won since the 1980s, allegedly thanks to its ownership of media and its cosy ties with successive governments.

Alstom, a French industrial giant, has endured numerous court battles in recent years. In 2014, most notably, the firm was ordered by the US government to pay a $772 million criminal fine, after pleading guilty to bribery charges at several of its global operations.   

Both causes, the erosion of services due to cutbacks and the unaccountable nexus between large corporations and the political system, are structural. This explains the depth of the public rage. Most Greeks have themselves used the rail line connecting the country’s two biggest cities, Athens and Thessaloniki, so the shock hit close to home.

Delayed signalling upgrades

An internal 16-page report (available in Greek here), written in 2021 by a top official at Ergose and now published by Reporters United, details how Aktor and Alstom violated the terms of the largely EU-funded signalling contract. This resulted in a multi-year delay and a €2.4 million fine.

The memo directed to the Ergose management was written by engineer Christos Katsioulis, formerly vice-president of the committee overseeing the project. Until 2022, he was also head of the project to install the ETCS train control system. Katsioulis resigned in 2022 and has since become a thorn in the side of officials. His memo explains that Aktor was tasked with implementing the signalling updates, while Alstom was obliged to provide know-how. Instead, the pair split the line in two, with Alstom responsible for the northern part, and Aktor for a large section of the Athens-Thessaloniki line, where the collision happened. 

“Ergose’s supervision insisted very much on the approval of studies that they knew were incorrect and did not pressure the contractor [Aktor] to fulfil their contractual obligations by having studies reviewed and signed by the expert know-how provider [Alstom],” writes Katsioulis. 

The project was also delayed due to the companies demanding a supplementary contract for further works. This ended up being signed in 2021, five years after the planned completion, adding €13 million to the original €41 million contract. Katsioulis was scathing in his 2021 critique: First, Alstom refused to provide know-how. Then, in 2021, Aktor subcontracted all remaining works to Alstom, but the signalling system now being built will not be robust enough to cater for heavy train traffic. Neither Alstom nor Aktor replied to requests for comments. 

A Troika legacy?  

There are other ways in which the Greek rail tragedy is also a European one. Officials from the IMF, the EU Commission and the European Central Bank, the entity known as “the Troika”, who insisted upon an alarming number of job cuts in the sector, should also be held accountable.

It was reported that in 2010, Poul Thomsen of the IMF, the head of the Troika, was so outraged when shown the accounts of OSE, the state railway company, that he threw the folder to the ground and shouted “shut it down!”. “Restructuring” and “making operational activities profitable, including by closing loss-making lines” was part of the first bailout programme imposed on Greece as a precondition for loans in 2010. Parts of the network were shut down that year, while the rest suffered a slow death by constant job losses.

Greece’s railways employed 12,500 people in 2000, but numbers had plummeted to 2000, by 2021. This is estimated to be enough to safely operate only 300 km of the 2,500 km network. The staffing shortages were among the findings of an investigation conducted by Investigate Europe and Reporters United into Europe’s railways in 2021. But the more radical cost-cutting Greek governments implemented, the more they were rewarded by the troika.

Fatal privatisation 

In 2017, while the leftist Syriza party was in power, the entire passenger train operation was sold to Ferrovie dello Stato, Italy’s state-owned railway provider, for a paltry €45 million, a privatisation that was a precondition for further Troika bailout loans. 

Christos Retsinas, former head of security at Trainose (now renamed Hellenic Train and owned by Ferrovie dello Stato), last week revealed that the split between rail line and train operations led to the shut down of a unified safety control centre tasked with ensuring no mistakes were made at stations. Hellenic Train has not publicly disputed this claim. Retsinas also described how the new Italian management relieved train managers from their security-related tasks, in order to free more hands for passenger services.

Hellenic Train, the Ferrovie dello Stato subsidiary, claims it bears no responsibility for the accident. The company has successfully lobbied the Greek government to exempt it from the EU passenger rights regulation, meaning it is not obliged to compensate the wounded and the families of the dead. Under pressure, it has issued a statement reassuring that it will. Only after the crash did the company reveal that it had sued the rail company, OSE, for safety failures in the network. FSI did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

This state of constant bickering between rolling stock companies and rail companies is one of the biggest weaknesses of the fragmented system. But Ferrovie and the Greek state appear to have found a balance of terror, to the detriment of safety. Ferrovie no longer requires modern safety systems in the new 15-year contract it has signed with the Greek state. The state no longer requires it to invest over €600 million during this period. 

The Italian company is still on track to receive €750 million in state subsidies for the next 15 years. It is also obligated to invest only €62 million in rolling stock upgrades, most of which was spent on revamping 30-year-old Pendolino trains abolished in Switzerland.

Transport minister Kostas Karamanlis never faced any scrutiny for this 15-year deal. But his position became untenable in the aftermath of the crash and he had to resign. Only days before he had defended the safety of the train network in parliament: “It is shameful that you are raising safety issues and I urge you to recant immediately. It’s a disgrace. I explained and I will repeat: we ensure safety.”

Suddenly, the entire country is focusing on the repeated warnings of impending doom, issued during the past years by various rail worker unions. Greece has become a textbook case of how to bring a railway system to its knees. EU Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen sent a fact finding mission to Athens on Wednesday, and rightly so. The current and former Greek government responsibilities must be determined, and the role of Ferrovie dello Stato, Aktor and Alstom must become clear. Mrs von der Leyen might also want to shine light on the failures of the EU rail policies and the fatal decisions made by the Troika, of which the Commission was part. Those trains weren’t travelling in a collision course for 12 minutes, they were travelling for 13 years.

Το άρθρο French contractor, Italian-owned trains, EU policies: Greek crash was also a European failure εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.

By the time the red and black-hulled liner made its way out of Kola Bay, navigated round Scandinavia, and docked in the Netherlands six days later, though, the outlook for the Malibu and the hundreds of European vessels like it had shifted once again. 

The previous day, on 2 September, France, Germany, Italy and the G7 announced plans for a price cap on Russian oil exports. And on Wednesday 28 September, the EU Commission said it too will propose a price cap on Russian oil. It is the latest move by the West to stem billions of euros flowing to the Kremlin. EU lawmakers previously unveiled plans for a sanctions package on 30 May after weeks of indecision on how to target the Russian energy sector. European Council chair Charles Michel called that initial deal a “remarkable achievement”.

Under the measures, an embargo on crude oil shipments and associated products will start fully next year. All coal imports were banned from 10 August. The EU has said it will cut gas imports by two-thirds within a year, but not introduce an outright ban. And while Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, and other financiers are now off the Swift payment system, the sanctions’ true impact won’t be felt in Moscow for some time yet.

Sinking EU imports

The sluggish European response on Russian energy reflects how essential it has been as a power source for the continent. Typically, Russia accounts for roughly 45% of EU gas imports, (mainly via pipelines), 25% of imported oil and 45% of coal imports. Last year, Russia received around €400 billion from the EU for energy exports.

Between the invasion starting and the end of August, 40% (75 million deadweight tonnes (DWT) in capacity), of Russia’s seaborne fossil fuels exports were destined for the EU. This is based on analysis of data from the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Equasis (DWT is the total capacity of a ship, including its cargo). Maritime trade is most profitable to Russia, although pipeline gas is also essential to the EU. These gas imports have dropped more than 80% since last year and are likely to be hit further after state-run Gazprom said it would switch off the Nord Stream supply. 

The Malibu’s arrival at Europe’s biggest port contributed to make the Netherlands the EU’s largest importer, with oil, gas and coal shipments on vessels totaling 20.71 million DWT arriving during the period. Italy (9.06 million DWT), France (6.48 million DWT) and Germany (5.28 million DWT) were also major recipients. Researchers have estimated that European purchases can provide $285 million (€279 million) a day to the Russian state.

Unsurprisingly, imports have slumped since. July and August departures to EU ports decreased almost 50% compared to January and February, while an increasing appetite from Asia and Turkey is filling growing European gaps. With sanctions looming and future fuel sources unknown, though, a handful of EU nations continue to import ahead of a winter set to be defined by soaring prices and cost of living crises. 

Imports to Italy, Greece and Denmark increased in July and August compared to the first two months of the year. Italy and Greece, along with Bulgaria, also received imports on Russian-owned vessels totaling 120,000 DWT capacity over the summer. This included deliveries from Volga Shipping, a firm owned by Russian Oligarch and outspoken critic of the invasion, Vladimir Lisin. Volga Shipping did not respond to Investigate Europe’s requests for comment by the time of publication.

European ships keep exports afloat

It is the vast network of European ships, though, which continues to prop up international trade. New analysis by Investigate Europe and Reporters United estimates that European oil, gas and coal vessels (with 101.59 million DWT capacity) departed Russia 1513 times between 24 February and 31 August. This represents 55% of the 184 million DWT globally. 

Analysis of CREA and Equasis datasets reveals that Greek-owned ships accounted for 35% of the global total, with 799 journeys conducted on ships with 64.84 million DWT in capacity. Chinese vessels (20.89 million DWT) were the next largest carriers.

Among the vessels with European ownership or management links, carriers with 86 million DWT capacity are tied to EU countries. More than half of all oil shipments were on EU-connected ships. 

Even after the sanctions package was announced in May, European boats conducted 570 trips (38 million DWT capacity) in the following three months. Germany, with shipments tied to more than 20 companies on ships with 9.16 million DWT capacity, was Europe’s next largest transporter.

Oldendorff is among the world’s largest bulk carrier firms. In June, the Hamburg company held an event for its 100^th anniversary where the head of the family business, Henning Oldendorff, said they had helped “many relatives and families” of their Ukrainian employees settle in Germany. But between late February and August, at least 20 Oldendorff ships exported Russian coal internationally. During the period, Oldendorff ships with a capacity of 3.8 million DWT completed 43 journeys. The firm did not respond to comment requests for this article.

Another maritime family involved in the trade is Norway’s Viken Shipping. Controlled by multi-millionaire Tom Steckmest and his family, since the invasion began four of the Bergen-based firm’s ships have completed more than 20 voyages from Russian ports.

In an email to Investigate Europe, Chairman Hans Olav Lindal said three of these ships have been leased long-term to French energy giant Total since 2018 and 2019. The firm also leased ships to Litasco, owned by Russian firm Lukoil, but Lindal said these were not renewed after May 2022. Viken has previously urged its customers not to sail from Russia. “Apart from Total, our other customers have complied with our request not to send ships to Russian ports,” he said.

Total told Investigate Europe the firm has “consistently expressed its outright condemnation of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine”. In a statement Total said it has already agreed to terminate its purchase of Russian oil and oil products and is in the process of selling its shares in two gas and oil projects in the country. “Before EU Sanctions were enacted, TotalEnergies had unilaterally decided that it will no longer enter into or renew contracts to purchase Russian oil and petroleum products, in order to halt all its purchases of Russian oil and petroleum products as soon as possible and by the end of 2022 at the latest.” 

On 19 August, Viken’s last shipment of the month left Russia for Poland. Earlier in the day, the Spanish-owned Monte Ulia departed Ust’-Luga for the Netherlands. Part of the Basque-based Ibaizabal Group, the crude oil ship completed five journeys (total capacity 782,120 DWT) during the period. Owned by Alejandro Aznar Sainz (who once helped the Spanish king emeritus, Juan Carlos de Borbón, pay a multimillion-euro tax fine) and his family, the Monte Ulia’s owners are among the 200 richest people in Spain. The firm declined to comment. 

A vessel destined for Spain in August was the San Felix. Managed by Gestioni Armatoriali, the largest Italian exporter (186,452 DWT capacity), data shows the tanker completed three of the firm’s five journeys during the period. Based in the eastern port city of Ravenna, the company also has real estate links. Its owners are among the investors in the construction of a new cruise port in Ravenna, alongside US giant Royal Caribbean International. The firm failed to respond to Investigate Europe’s request for comment.

Firms linked to Monaco (5.07 million DWT), the UK (4.8 million DWT), Croatia (3 million DWT) and Malta (902,055) were also prominent transporters. 

Greek shipping magnates

But it is the powerful Greek shipping industry facilitating most trade. The Malibu is part of George Economou’s TMS Group. Vessels linked to the 69-year-old billionaire, who has an art gallery adorning his name at London’s Tate Modern, carried out 78 trips on vessels totaling 9.2 million DWT in capacity since the invasion started. Economou did not respond to questions for this article by the time of publication. 

Others include the Alafouzos family (2.1 million DWT) and Vardis Vardinoyannis (1.6 million DWT). Between them they control three of Greece’s private national television stations, and while their media regularly condemn “Russia’s brutal invasion”, their businesses continue to profit from transporting fossil fuels. Neither company had responded to Investigate Europe’s requests for comment by the time of publication.

Insurers under fire

Its leverage in the sector – 30% of the world’s oil tanker fleet (based on tonnage) is in Greek hands – helped water down EU plans for a partial embargo on Russian oil – and no embargo on gas. According to newspaper Vima, the governments of Greece, Cyprus, and Malta opposed the embargo plan. The lobbying efforts, supported by Hungary, worked as the EU softened its stance by allowing shippers to continue transporting oil to non-EU countries.Ukraine has pressured the industry since the first days of the war. President Volodymyr Zelensky criticised those shipping oil from Russia in early July, with a pointed message for the influential Greek operators: “I am sure that this does not meet the interests of Europe, Greece or Ukraine.”

In March, the Ukrainian government urged the International Group of P&I Clubs (IGP&I), providers of liability cover for 90% of global seaborne cargo, “to cut off the flow of cash which is financing the mass murder of innocent people.”

CREA data shows that of 3176 shipments leaving Russia internationally during the period, an insurer is listed 2583 times. Of 15 named, the 13 IGP&I members are insurers for nearly all journeys, including the Malibu’s insurer, Gard AS, a Norwegian firm and the third largest insurer named. Asked about any role they have in helping to fund the Russian state, a spokesperson said: “We comply with the sanctions that apply at all times. At the same time, of course, we follow developments closely, and constantly make assessments related to this topic.”

Environmental campaign group Global Witness estimated that members of the UK-based IGP&I enabled the export of 40 million barrels of oil in the first month of the war. “Without that insurance, it would be almost impossible for Russia to maintain its current fossil fuel exports, the same exports funding the war in Ukraine,” Senior Investigator Lela Stanley told Investigate Europe. “The enablers of Russia’s trade in oil, gas, and coal are propping up a regime that murders innocent civilians even as it drives the climate crisis.” IGP&I did not respond to Investigate Europe’s requests for comment by the time of publication.

The new sanctions state EU firms will be prohibited from insuring Russian oil trades to third-party countries. Under G7 plans, the dominant UK sector will only be able to insure seaborne oil exports if buyers purchase within the price cap. Russia’s deputy prime minister Alexander Novak said they would refuse to deal with countries adopting price limits. 

Will EU sanctions work? 

Despite the sanctions, the International Energy Agency said in August that there has been “more limited declines in Russian supply than previously forecast”. Exports to major markets have plummeted by nearly 2.2 million barrels per day since February, but two-thirds have been rerouted elsewhere.

Rerouting, as well as suspect ship-to-ship transfers – where ships unload cargo onto another vessel at sea and switch off tracking systems to evade detection and country sanctions – is increasingly prevalent with Russian fossil fuels. 

Dr Adnan Vatansever, Reader in Russian politics at the Russia Institute, King’s College London, says that while Europe initially adopted a “cautious approach”, major market shifts that could dent Putin’s purse are possible in the next year.

“The way the sanctions have been proposed means this will likely lead to a significant reorientation of Russian oil,” he says. “Oil will flow wherever there is someone willing to pay money. For oil, Russia’s task is easier because it has a massive surplus capacity in terms of its export infrastructure and so rerouting the oil for Russia is not really a difficult task.”

Vatansever says the success of sanctions will depend on what happens to global oil prices and whether developing nations support the price cap plans or continue to purchase at higher rates. “The goal of the price cap sanction is not to curb Russian oil exports but to curb Russian oil incomes,” the author of Oil in Putin’s Russia says. “If Russian quantities remain the same but they earn significantly less that is actually the desired outcome.”

A question of morality?

The destinations for cargo may be shifting, but one moral question remains: can shippers continue to help provide Russia with billions of euros to finance the war? 

Dockers in the UK, Sweden and Netherlands all refused to unload Russian oil in recent months, but it can be a more complicated question for operators as some are on time charters agreed before the war started. While others carry cargo with spot charters – a single route – and therefore were decided after 24 February.

However, it appears of little concern to Greece’s shipowners. Melina Travlou, the Union of Greek Shipowners president, said at a June conference that the union condemned Russia’s actions in Ukraine, but added: “The Greek shipowners are not doing anything illegal, they are not breaking some embargo.”

For Viken, the largest Norwegian shipper during the period, its chairman told Investigate Europe there is little they can do apart from advising clients not to enter Russian ports. “As of today, our customers are not on any sanctions list, and Russian oil is a legal commodity,” he said. “The leases were entered into long before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”

In taking a stand against Russia, Europe’s own energy concerns are mounting. “We need to understand that the pre-war situation with abundant, cheap fossil fuels is not coming back,” Commission Vice-President Frans Timmermans said in mid-September. “The next winters – not just this one – will be difficult.” 

Despite the public outcries, pending sanctions and global uncertainty, the lucrative sea crossings persist. As this piece went online, George Economou’s Malta-flagged Malibu was moving across the North Sea, piled high again with black gold cargo and topping up Putin’s war chest once more. Next stop, Turkey.

#Fuelling War is a joint investigation of Investigate Europe and Reporters United. Contributions: Lorenzo Buzzoni, Ingeborg Eliassen, Manuel Rico, Nico Schmidt, Amund Trellevik. Data visualisation: David Meidinger, Hendrik Lehmann (Tagesspiegel Innovation lab).

Το άρθρο European ships bolster Russian fossil fuel trade despite looming EU sanctions εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.

Photos: Thodoris Nikolaou Thodoris Nikolaou and Myriam Patrou contributed to reporting
English version by Georgia Nakou.

Our car approaches Nitsiakos and Pindos poultry farms, located a few kilometres apart, outside the city of Ioannina in northwest Greece. 

These two businesses, together with Ambrosiadis in Katerini further to the east, are some of the biggest in Greece. They are pillars of their local economies, each employing hundreds of people. With the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, they also became infection hot spots. 

In October 2020, Pindos announced that it was suspending the operation of its poultry processing plant after several cases of Covid-19 were identified. In June 2021, medical staff at Katerini hospital traced 30 cases of Covid-19 among foreign workers at the Ambrosiadis plant, outbreaks that had been kept secret. 

In July 2021, Greece’s Civil Protection Agency ordered a temporary suspension of operations at Nitsiakos after tracing a local outbreak among its workers. The Mayor of Ioannina, Moses Elisaf spoke at the time of a “serious and extremely worrying” situation, noting that “the people involved were unvaccinated, despite working in crowded, high risk workplaces”.

In the barn and the slaughterhouses

Greece’s Food Safety Agency, EFET, classifies poultry farms as high risk workplaces  due to their intensive, crowded working conditions, but prioritizing them for vaccines is another matter.

Most poultry businesses work with Greek, Pakistani and Albanian subcontractors, who supply them with workers, mostly from Pakistan, India or Afghanistan. Some of the workers have a residence permit or have been granted asylum. Many, however, are undocumented, while our investigation showed that some are under the legal working age of 18.

The exploitation of undocumented workers, which had been a humanitarian and employment rights issue before the pandemic, has now evolved into a public health issue as lack of access to vaccination undermines the entire national vaccination programme.

While undocumented labour in poultry farms is an open secret among migrant communities, it was hard to get anyone to speak to us on the record, even on condition of anonymity. One worker finally agreed to be interviewed. 

Hassan (his real name is known to Lighthouse Reports) is 19 years old and comes from Pakistan. He arrived in Greece in 2018 as an unaccompanied minor. The conditions he encountered here forced him to grow up quickly. 

At 16, while still living in the “safe zone” for unaccompanied minors inside an accommodation facility for refugees and migrants, he took his first job at a poultry farm.

Working in the poultry farm is not easy. “You can be working in the poultry barns at night, picking up chickens with the truck, or in the slaughterhouse, or at the feeding stations,”, said Hassan. “Many workers can’t cope with it and end up leaving”. 

He spent several months without papers, but eventually he was granted leave to remain in the country on humanitarian grounds. This was not the case for other workers, and the legislation under which Hassan was given papers has now been rescinded. “Even now, there are people working there without papers, as well as children from migrant facilities who are under 18,” Hassan explained. 

“There have been anonymous reports of the poultry farms using undocumented workers,” said Despina Konstantinou, President of the Katerini Labour Association. “However, they have been difficult to substantiate…They belong to different nationalities, they sometimes come from different parts of Greece and work for short stints.” This makes it almost impossible to cross-reference names with shift records. 

“Until now we haven’t been given any information on vaccination,” Hassan said. “The only instruction we are given is to wear our protective suits. Not everyone is vaccinated.” Hassan took the initiative himself and got vaccinated three months ago, mainly, he said, because he was afraid. “Migrants are often given fines for no reason, but mostly I just didn’t want to catch the virus.”

It is not the same for his fellow workers: “Every week some people get sick. They leave and then they come back after 14 days. In the summer there were no cases, but now they have gone up.”

Greece on the Lighthouse Reports Scorecard

The visualisation can be found in the Lighthouse Reports website.

Greece is not the only country where the meat processing sector has been at the epicentre of Covid-19 outbreaks. Similar incidents on an even greater scale were recorded in Belgium, France, Ireland, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, the UK, and particularly in Germany.

What sets Greece apart is the official response to the problem, which does not follow any of the approaches adopted elsewhere.

In Germany, for instance, the federal government passed a law in November 2020 barring meat processors from using temporary agency workers. 

The ECDC has urged member states to include the vaccination of migrants as a priority in their national vaccination plans. Lighthouse Reports has mapped vaccination policies in 18 European countries. Reporters collected evidence relating to each country’s official policy towards on vaccinating undocumented migrants. 

In Greece, the lack of reliable, detailed public policy makes it difficult to draw conclusions. While the country appears open and positive at the level of official pronouncements, the official policy and reality on the ground are quite different. Greece scores low for access to vaccination by undocumented and marginalised populations.

While the country has struggled to presuade a significant section of the local population to get the vaccine, it has also been desperately slow vaccinating undocumented migrants. The only targeted information campaign was Vaccines For All, co-organised by INTERSOS Hellas, the Greek Forum of Migrants and the Greek Forum of Refugees. The campaign started in August 2021 with materials available in 10 languages. 

According to Apostolos Veizis, a medical doctor and director of INTERSOS, the Greek state never ran an organised campaign in migrants’ native languages, while on the side of the vulnerable populations there was suspicion that the pandemic could be used as a way to criminalise and deport them. 

While the potential “blind spot” relating to undocumented migrants was already becoming evident in 2020, the government first acted to provide access to vaccination in the spring of 2021 – even then however, the published policies were far from effective.

In May 2021, government guidance was issued allowing those with identification documents from their own countries to obtain a temporary social security number (known by the Greek acronym PAMKA) to allow them to get vaccinated.

“Many migrants, however, lacked these papers”, said Veizis, “meaning they still lacked access to vaccination.”

On October 2, 2021, in response to pressure from civil society organisations and public health experts, a new law (4839/2021) gave undocumented the right to obtain a PAMKA number, which would allow them to get vaccinated without risking deportation. It also gave local authorities and NGOs the ability to participate in the vaccination programme. 

In practice, however, there have been delays in implementing the law, and it is still not possible for most undocumented migrants to get vaccinated. A Joint Ministerial Decision issued in  December 2021 – two months after the law was passed – gives undocumented people access to the official vaccination process. However, according to Lefteris Papagiannakis, a legal expert and director of the Greek Council for Refugees, this only opens the door to people who have some form of identification document, even if it is expired or invalid. People with no papers at all – the so-called “invisibles” – are still unable to register.

“It is very positive that the process was put in place, as this is very important for the protection of public health,” said Papagiannakis. “However, the state should also provide for those who have no papers at all”, he concluded.  

The lists of the invisibles

A photo on the wall of the meeting room of the Centre of Ioannina Labour Unions, a regional trade union organisation, shows a group of women, workers in a poultry farm, probably taken some time in the 1990s. 

On the table in front of us, next to a pack of cigarettes and an old-school mobile phone belonging to the labour union’s president, are lists from the Labour Inspectorate containing information on two employment agencies, one run by a Greek woman, the other by a Pakistani man, which supply temporary workers to the Nitsiakos and Pindos poultry plants.

The lists include the employment details of workers for the financial years 2017-2020. They show 292 workers, with around 90% listed as working 4- or 6-hour shifts. “In reality, there is no such thing as 4- and 6-hour shifts at the plants”, Nikos Exarchos, the labour union president tells us. “They work 8, 10, 12 hours. We can’t demonstrate it, but that is the reality we know, we live it”, he says. 

This is not just the case in Ioannina and Katerini. In many parts of the country, particularly in farming areas, undocumented workers are the norm. “There is a tacit acceptance of this reality, which shouldn’t really exist. Profits are made on the back of people who exist in a legal grey area,” states Papagiannakis. 

No one knows – even by approximation – the number of undocumented people who have been vaccinated in Greece to date. We have been trying since the beginning of November 2021 to obtain information through repeated requests from the Ministries of Health and Migration Policy, with no success.

Back in Ioannina, in the neighbourhood of Kaloutsani, we met several people without identification papers who told us about their efforts to get vaccinated. None of the state agencies helped them. Their only sources of information have been social media, friends and acquaintances. Despite trying, none of them had succeeded in getting vaccinated. 

The poultry businesses and their subcontractors

Lighthouse Reports and Reporters United have contacted all three poultry businesses named in this investigation with questions relating to the story.

A spokesperson for Nitsiakos responded that “the vaccination rate among employees, including workers employed through subcontractors, approaches 90%. It goes without saying that we are not in a position to enforce vaccination on those who wish to remain unvaccinated.”

A member of the Ambrosiadis AVEE board denied the existence of “invisible” employees. “All the workers here are real people. I can’t respond to hypothetical questions. There are no people without papers ; that would be a matter for the Labour Inspectorate.”

A representative of Ambrosiadis acknowledged that there are workers in the company who are unvaccinated but claimed that all protocols are observed, including rapid tests, while there is continuous monitoring and updating.

The case of Ambrosiadis offers an insight into how the practice of “renting” employees from agencies serves to distance businesses from their responsibilities, while on the other hand making it incredibly hard to identify and trace employees, particularly those without papers. 

The company’s spokesperson acknowledged that Ambrosiadis used subcontractors, claiming that this was due to a lack of Greek workers for the slaughterhouses. “The responsibility lies with the contractor who employs them, we have a relationship with them and not with the workers directly”.

Pindos did not respond to our requests for information. 

Το άρθρο The Invisible Unvaccinated εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.

On November 29, 2021, as part of a joint investigation by Solomon and Reporters United regarding the allocation of European funds for the accommodation of asylum seekers in Greece, reporter Kostas Koukoumakas emailed questions to the NGO Hopeten.

[In January 2021, Solomon had published an extensive report  on NGO when it was still called Hopeland.]

On December 6, 2021, Hopeten replied to the email by inviting the journalist to a meeting at their office. The meeting took place a few days later, on December 10, 2021, and was attended by the Hopeten public relations manager Ms. Mara Samara, the director of the company Mr. Nikolaos Vlachos, as well as Solomon journalist Fanis Kollias.

Hopeten requested that the interview not be recorded, but agreed to let us take notes. During the interview, Hopeten’s representatives answered many of the questions we had emailed to them.

Ten days later, on December 20, 2021, and without any further communication between the two sides, Hopeten served Solomon and Reporters United with a legal notice. Hopeten, represented by attorney Nikolaos Agapinos, protested against our behavior towards the NGO which they described as “unethical, biased and in bad faith” and called on Solomon and Reporters United to “immediately refrain from any action that could damage the NGOs prestige and reputation”.  

Apart from their characterizations of our work, they also questioned whether Kostas Koukoumakas (a member of the Journalists’ Union of Athens Daily Newspapers, with many years of experience in Greek and foreign media) is indeed a journalist, additionally, there are extensive excerpts in the legal notice that raise sincere questions. More specifically, references are made to:

• the former mayor of Athens and current KINAL MP, Giorgos Kaminis,

• the former Deputy Minister of Health and current SYRIZA MP, Pavlos Polakis,

• billionaire George Soros,

• another NGO Solidarity Now,

• the “country’s performance in managing the refugee crisis” which “recently have improved significantly”, raising questions about whether the legal notice was drafted by representatives of civil society or by the government.

The full text of Hopeten’s legal notice can be found here (in Greek).

In our response, Solomon and Reporters United made it clear that our position will remain solely in the context of our journalistic function. We contacted Hopeten again, asking them to reply to the questions we had previously submitted to them –questions that are a matter of public interest. The full text of our response can be found here (in Greek).

March 2021: Hopeten offers us a collaboration…

In the year and a half of our coverage of the issue, this is not the first time that the NGO has served us with a legal notice, urging us to refrain from covering and reporting on its activities.

Exactly one year ago, in January 2021, Solomon published a report on the allocation of significant funding from the Ministry of Migration & Asylum to the newly-established (at the time) NGO Hopeland (which was later renamed Hopeten) to house thousands of asylum seekers.

The case of this NGO was clearly of journalistic interest to us, as within a short period of time since its establishment (and without having any previous experience in the field) Hopeten had secured more than €7 million in funding for a period of fifteen months!

Shortly after the report was published, in March 2021, Hopeten’s public relations manager, Ms. Samara, repeatedly contacted Stavros Malichudis, the Solomon journalist who wrote the report, and asked to meet with him.

During the meeting, which took place at Solomon’s offices, Ms. Samara presented a proposal. She suggested that Malichudis and Solomon might be interested in cooperating with them to create a Youtube channel, which would post videos of Malichudis interviewing beneficiaries of Hopeten programs.

Expressing the general feeling of his colleagues, Stavros Malichudis rejected the offer, explaining that such cooperation would violate the rules of journalistic ethics, given the previous report that Solomon had published.

July 2021: The first legal notice

On July 14, 2021, Stavros Malichudis, on behalf of Solomon, addressed further questions to Hopeten, requesting information regarding certain data on the NGO which had become public and was posted in the Ministry of Digital Governance’s Registry of Subsidized Bodies.

Based on the published data, Hopeten had conducted financial transactions in the hundreds of thousands of euros in total with a company based outside of Athens.

However, our journalistic investigation revealed that the company in question had received money from Hopeten before the company had even entered into legal taxation status. In other words, at the time, based on the Registry data, while the company appeared to receive significant amounts of money from Hopeten, the company was (literally) non-existent.

We, therefore, considered it our duty, in the context of journalistic ethics, to address relevant questions to Hopeten by email. The director of Hopeten, Mr. Nikolaos Vlachos, replied that the data which was published was “inadvertently wrong” and that no problem arises, since this “mistake” had now been corrected, possibly thanks to our research and findings.

By their director’s response, Hopeten urged us to refrain from any “untrue” and “defamatory” report that may offend the company’s “reputation, credibility, work and solvency, in order to serve selfish and unfair third-party interests” −without specifying what those “interests” are.

We continue our coverage

During the same investigation on the allocation of EU funds for the accommodation of asylum seekers in Greece, Hopeten was not the only one to try, through legal action, to prevent the publication of our report.

On November 30, 2021, in response to questions about the same issue that journalist Iliana Papangeli had emailed to a Greek real estate company, we received a legal notice, through the company’s lawyer, which urged us to refrain from “any slanderous and defamatory report” as well as from “any reference or association of the company with the refugee issue, with refugees in Greece and the NGOs active in this field” otherwise they “will take legal action and appeal to the justice system”.

In Europe, more and more instances of journalists being served with legal notices and being sued, by those involved in a report −(before a report is even published), in an attempt to prevent the publication of information that they may find incriminating− are being recorded.

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) target journalists who challenge big interests, but the purpose of such lawsuits is not always to win the court case itself.

This is not the first time we have been confronted with this abusive practice. In January 2021, the company Rewarding Packaging Recycling, active in the packaging recycling sector in Greece, sent a legal notice through its lawyer Alexis Kougias against Reporters United and reporter Thodoris Chondrogiannos in response to the journalistic questions we had sent to the company, before we even publish the report. (Read more on the case here.)

International journalist unions have sounded the alarm regarding incidents where big interests have launched legal proceedings against journalists and independent media outlets in order to cause their financial, psychological, and moral destruction.

Το άρθρο SLAPPs against Greek independent media Solomon and Reporters United εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.

Scraping και data analysis: Sotiris Sideris
Editing: Georgia Nakou, Sindhuri Nandhakumar

Most Greek islands have remained cut off from the country’s main power grid for decades, relying on oil generators which cost billions of euros to run. They pollute the environment and also damage the health of local communities. An investigation by Investigate Europe and Reporters United identifies the few winners — including the two biggest business families in Greece — and many losers of this arrangement.

It is a little after 3 am on June 2, 2020, and the tanker Ice Hawk is anchored off the coast of the Greek island of Rhodes. It will remain there for the next eight hours, pumping 6,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil into the power station at Soroni. Rhodes is a popular holiday destination, and Nikos Passalis runs a hotel near the power station. “Visitors arrive at the hotel and the first thing they see are the chimneys,” he shares. “At the beach they see the chimneys and the black smoke, they hear the generator, they smell the fuel. Many of them ask us how we can burn black oil in a holiday paradise.”

A few miles inland from Soroni power station is Butterfly Valley, one of Rhodes’ main natural attractions and a Natura 2000 protected zone. The island’s second power station in south Rhodes is located in the midst of another nature reserve, meaning the tankers drop anchor in sight of a unique and fragile ecosystem which is — at least nominally — protected by law.

“Wasted billions” 

Rhodes is not unique in this arrangement. Today, 29 autonomous power grids supply 47 islands with electricity generated by burning diesel and heavy fuel oil — one of the most polluting petroleum fuels with a high sulphur content. The islands were electrified in the post-World War II period in the rush to modernise the country. Greece’s geography, with hundreds of small islands far from the mainland, made independent power generation the only practical option at the time.  

Between the 1960s and 1980s, some island groups off Athens and western Greece were connected to the mainland’s grid. However, the Cyclades, the Dodecanese and Crete have remained stranded for more than four decades, despite evidence stating that interconnection was both technically feasible and cost-effective. 

The Public Power Corporation (PPC, commonly referred to by its Greek acronym DEI), Greece’s state-owned former monopoly power company, concluded that connecting Crete to the mainland grid was financially viable as early as 1981; This information was stated in its annual report from that year. Today, politicians and experts alike estimate that the planned Attica-Crete interconnector will cost €1 billion to build. But the Greek Environment and Energy Ministry estimated that it will save €400 million annually, suggesting that the project would pay for itself in two and a half years. 

Greece is finally on course to cut the islands’ dependence on fuel oil and diesel for electricity, but this is not due to happen before the end of the decade. According to the National Energy and Climate Change Plan, Crete will be connected to the national power grid by 2023, the Cycladic islands by 2025, the Dodecanese by 2028 and the islands of the north Aegean by 2029.

If it has been feasible for decades, why did it take so long?

A former senior government official who spoke to Investigate Europe and Reporters United has no doubt as to why. “There is a lot of money involved and there are vested interests in the domestic oil industry,” he says, adding, “Governments turned a blind eye to the cost for consumers and wasted billions. This benefitted the oil industry, the shipping companies transporting the fuel, people in DEI-PPC who had gained influence in the power stations and local communities. Everyone was satisfied — apart from citizens, who were paying billions”.

The winners – fuel suppliers and shipping companies

Every year, DEI-PPC invites bids for the supply and transport of heavy fuel oil (HFO) and diesel. In 2017, records show it spent €310 million on fuel oil and €380 million on diesel. In 2018, the cost was €330 and €240 million respectively, and the projected cost for 2019 was €318 million euros for HFO and 295.4 million for diesel. 

Reporters United analysed the available data on DEI-PPC’s fuel contract auctions. The figures go back to 2014 and were scraped from the DEI-PPC’s online database. (We have published here the scraped database in the form of a spreadsheet for journalists and researchers to work on it.)

Two domestic oil companies, HELPE (Hellenic Petroleum) and Motor Oil emerge as DEI-PPC’s biggest suppliers of fuel for the islands, alongside a handful of foreign companies (including Petroineos, Vitol and Shell Trading Rotterdam).

We were not able to obtain consistent data for years prior to 2014 despite repeatedly approaching DEI-PPC and its domestic suppliers. However, DEI-PPC’s Board reports show that the diesel contracts for the years 2010-2013 were shared between HELPE and Motor Oil.

The HELPE Group, controlled by the Latsis family, has received €1.4 billion since 2014 for supplying fuel to the islands. Besides its controlling stake in the HELPE group, which is the biggest oil company in Greece, the Geneva-based Latsis family has business interests in banking, real estate and shopping malls. It is also the main stakeholder and developer of the €8 billion Hellinikon project. According to the FT, this is “Europe’s largest urban regeneration project” and “Greece’s most significant private investment in a decade”. 

Motor Oil, a Vardinogiannis Group company, was awarded contracts worth €400 million for the islands, of which €360 million (90%) was related to fuel for the power stations. The sums may be atypically low, as, according to its own financial reports, Motor Oil reduced its sales to DEI-PPC from 2014 onwards, and has not been awarded any contracts since 2015. We asked the company to explain this change, but we did not receive a response.

The fact that Motor Oil was also supplying DEI-PPC with heavy fuel oil prior to 2014 is implied in the company’s financial reports.Its annual report for 2018 states: The decline in the fuel oil market share after 2014 is mainly accounted for by the gradually declining fuel oil sales to PUBLIC POWER CORPORATION S.A. (PPC) which zeroed in the years 2017 and 2018”. Furthermore, an analysis by a stock market brokerage firm observed in 2017 that the fact of Motor Oil not providing DEI-PPC with fuel oil happened “for the first time - maybe - in the history of the company” - Motor Oil was founded in 1970.

The Vardinogiannis group is considered one of Greece’s biggest industrial groups, with stakes in oil and energy, in shipping, in the hotel industry and in the media, while also owning two of the country’s largest private TV stations.

Three foreign suppliers — Petroineos, Vitol and Shell Trading Rotterdam — were also awarded contracts totalling €1.3 billion between 2014 and early 2021. In July 2021, DEI-PPC Chairman and CEO George Stassis told a parliamentary committee that the contracts for heavy fuel oil in 2021 were assigned to Petroineos and Coral Energy PTE, both international oil companies, for €210 and €120 million respectively.

In addition to the fuel for the generators, DEI-PPC pays to lease the tankers used to transport it to the islands, and for the transport fuel for those tankers (bunker fuel).

Between 2014 and 2021, DEI-PPC paid €32 million euros and €3.5 million respectively for tanker leasing and tanker fuel to the companies SEKAVIN and SEKAVAR, both of the Vardinogiannis group.

Over the same period, it paid €40 million to Aegean Oil SA for bunker fuel and over €5.7 million for tanker leasing to Aegean Agency Shipping and Trading SA, both companies controlled by Dimitris Melissanidis. In total, since 2014, Melissanidis companies were awarded almost €77 million in contracts related to electricity provision for the islands. Dimitris Melissanidis, the founder and main shareholder of the group, is one of Greece’s biggest business figures, with interests in shipping, gambling, football and the media.

Reporters United asked DEI-PPC, HELPE, Motor Oil and Aegean Oil to clarify whether these sums relate exclusively to electricity generation on the islands and whether there are additional sums involved. None of the companies responded.

We know that in fact there are often additional costs. For example, in May 2020, in spite of the pandemic, the Greek energy regulator RAE approved the leasing of emergency generators by DEI-PPC to cover demand in Crete, to the tune of €1.5 million. The generators were supplied by the TERNA Group, which also leased generators to DEI-PPC in 2019 at a cost of €1.4 million.

Questions

The procurement pattern revealed in the contracts shows a handful of commercial players dominating the supply of fuel over a long period of time. This is an oligopoly that has worked to the detriment of consumers.

“The delay in building interconnectors favoured the oil industry, as over decades it had a captive market for its products,” comments Takis Grigoriou of Greenpeace. “Even more so when we are talking about fuel oil, which would be hard to sell elsewhere because of its low quality.”

There are also hints that the arrangement between the public power company and its suppliers had become too cosy. Questions have been raised in Parliament about DEI-PPC’s fuel procurement, ranging from specific allegations of corruption to the lack of competitiveness and impartiality of the overall tender process. 

In one instance it was suggested by an MP (George Amyras, who now is the vice-minister of Energy) that the DEI-PPC employees in charge of awarding the contracts held the positions over several years, making them susceptible to influence. In another case, an employee in the relevant department of DEI-PPC is said to have opened a petrol station in a franchise owned by Motor Oil after the company was awarded a fuel contract.  

Historically, fuel transport was not subject to a separate tender but was provided by the fuel suppliers themselves, an arrangement which DEI-PPC President Manolis Panagiotakis acknowledged at the time as “limited competition”. This changed in 2014, resulting in savings of €3.2 millions in just the first nine months of the new arrangement.

In 2017, the tender process was conducted online for the first time, in order to achieve “total transparency” and improve its competitiveness — a tacit acknowledgement that this had not been the case previously. 

The losers: consumers and island communities

Leaving the islands stranded from the main power grid results in eye-wateringly high electricity costs. According to regulator RAE, a MWh which costs €80 to generate on the Greek mainland costs €714 (571% more) on Anafi, €1,297 (1,037% more) on Antikythera, and a staggering €2,239 (1,791% more) on Agathonissi.

In order to avoid burdening the inhabitants of the islands disproportionately, the additional cost is shared by all electricity consumers through a mechanism known as Public Utility Services (shortened to YKO), which is a surcharge added to all customers’ electricity bills. According to RAE, the energy regulator, between 2007 and 2017 Greek electricity consumers subsidised the islands’ costly power supply to the tune of €6.5 billion through the YKO surcharge.

While the cost of powering the islands with oil generators hurts everyone’s pocket, the local communities pay an even higher price in terms of their health and quality of life. Monitoring by the European Environment Agency shows that the emissions from the Soroni power station include dangerous pollutants such as cadmium, nickel and PM10 particulates, linked to cancer and chronic respiratory diseases. Research conducted by Greenpeace in 2013 on the health impacts of oil-burning power stations on the islands linked their operation to 68 premature deaths every year. 

Oil spills are also a fact of life when refuelling by tanker. “We had two oil spills in Rhodes from fuel oil tankers, in 1993 and 2008,” recalls Dimitris Grigoriadis, a local resident. “Each time the authorities promised that no more polluting generators would be added, and that new technology would reduce pollution”. 

Neither promise materialised. The Soroni power station increased in capacity over time from 30 MW in 1975 to over 230 MW, while a new oil-burning generator was built on Rhodes as recently as 2019, with funding from the European Investment Bank.  

Wasted opportunities

“Technological progress has made connecting the islands to the grid easier and more cost-effective,” comments Dimitris Tsekeris of WWF, “but this was not the main reason the interconnectors were not built earlier. The discussion about Crete has been going on for years.”

According to Michalis Papadopoulos, professor emeritus of electrical engineering at the National Technical University of Athens, a feasibility study dating back to 1986 had already found that connecting Crete to the Greek mainland with two 300 MW cables was “technically feasible and economically advantageous”. DEI-PPC gave the go-ahead for the building of the interconnector in 1989, but, Papadopoulos says, “in May 1991, after political interventions which were the result of local objections to the building of a substation, DEI-PPC’s Board of Directors changed its mind and decided to postpone the project indefinitely”.

“Lack of public funds, poor planning, a weak institutional framework, objections by local communities — many factors were responsible for the delays,” says Nikos Mantzaris of Green Tank. “The only certainty is that these delays were detrimental to the environment, the climate, consumers’ electricity bills, and the quality of life of many islanders. The only beneficiary was the oil industry”.

Politics

There is a consensus among politicians of all stripes that connecting the islands to the grid is long overdue. However, politicians are equally united in their reluctance to accept responsibility or openly acknowledge the cause for delay.

A 2016 exchange in Parliament exemplifies the blame game that has helped maintain the toxic status quo. Debating the rising cost of electricity, New Democracy MP Olga Kefalogianni, who also happens to be a niece of Vardis Vardinogiannis, chairman of the Motor Oil Group, stated, “You know better than me that the Greek consumer pays €1 billion per year due to the lack of island interconnections. If the Crete and Cyclades interconnectors had gone ahead, the surcharge would have been abolished”.

A retort came from then Energy Minister Panos Skourletis, who said, “To be asked what is going on with the Crete interconnector by the people who were in charge of energy policy over the last several decades and did nothing does not show naivety, it shows nerve.”

Reporters United spoke to three former Environment and Energy ministers, all of whom were scathing about the delay in interconnecting the islands. None, however, was keen to point the finger at those responsible. 

“Interconnecting the islands and closing the DEI-PPC generators will have a series of positive effects,”, said Kostis Hatzidakis, who served in the post between July 2019 and January 2021. “Firstly, it will stop the burning of heavy fuel oil and diesel, which will reduce pollution. Secondly, it will reduce the cost of energy to consumers who are currently paying the YKO surcharge. Thirdly, it means that renewables will have a more active role in the country’s energy mix.” In an older statement, Hatzidakis had referred to the “polluting oil generators on our islands” as a “shameful picture”.  We asked him who should be ashamed, but he declined to answer.

Yiannis Maniatis, who was Environment, Energy and Climate Change Minister between June 2013 and January 2015 acknowledged that “the interconnection could have been implemented sooner and it is unfortunate that this did not happen, as we could have limited the cost and pollution sooner”. New Democracy and PASOK, the parties which Hatzidakis and Maniatis belong to, governed Greece in the critical decades between 1980 and 2015 when the opportunities for change were missed, but neither wished to comment on the political responsibilities.

George Stathakis, who was Environment Minister between November 2016 and July 2019 in the SYRIZA government, told Reporters United: “Our goal was to close the power stations on the islands, and free them from burning fossil fuels. When I went to Mykonos to switch on the interconnector, I saw the equipment that was being decommissioned and I was shocked. If you look at their environmental footprint, it is shocking.” This, however, did not stop his government from promoting major fossil fuel projects, such as oil and gas exploration and the EastMed gas pipeline. 

Making connections

Two things changed relatively recently that tilted the balance in favour of change. The first is that the newly spun-out power transmission operator IPTO (or ADMIE to use the Greek acronym) is obliged by the regulator to deliver a regulated return of 8% on its asset base. This incentivises it to undertake investments in the network. Since 2017, ADMIE-IPTO has also been partly privatised, and its governance is independent of DEI-PPC. Only 51% now belongs to the Greek state, while 24% is owned by China’s State Grid and 25% by other institutional and private investors.

The second and perhaps more powerful development is that the energy industry is being forced to turn away from fossil fuels as a result of climate change regulations and incentives to invest in green energy. 

This is already having a measurable impact on the domestic energy players. HELPE’s new corporate strategy published in 2021 includes bigger investments in renewables, electric transport and hydrogen. In October 2019, Motor Oil announced it was entering the renewables space with a €12 million investment in three wind farms, and in March 2021, the company followed up with investments in PV, storage batteries and electric transport.

“Oil companies are no longer interested in selling oil for the islands,” a well-informed industry source tells Investigate Europe and Reporters United. “They know there are no more profits to be had there. Now their main concern is to get a foothold in renewables and natural gas”.

Το άρθρο Burning oil in the Greek islands — and those who profited from it εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.

“On March 31 they put out the buoys, brought in the cranes, they dredged and dumped. Every day until late into the night, and sometimes through the night, they were digging, filling barges and dumping the contents between [the islands of] Aegina and Salamis”. 

Paediatrician and Piraeus city council member Dimitra Vini watched the work taking place during Greece’s first pandemic lockdown in spring 2020 with some trepidation. The location she describes is the Port of Piraeus where Chinese logistics giant COSCO, which has owned a controlling stake in the Piraeus Port Authority (PPA) since 2016, has started work on a cruise ship pier. The first phase of the project would allow two cruise ships to dock, while in its final form the port should be able to accommodate six 350-metre cruise ships.

COSCO initially took over the container operations of Piraeus port in 2009 with a 35-year concession and the goal to develop the port into a logistics center to move goods towards Europe. In 2016, it bought a 51% stake in Piraeus Port Authority for 280 million euros under the first phase of a concession agreement that will expire in 2052, also providing that COSCO would gain another 16% by summer of 2021, should it complete eleven mandatory investments worth 294 million euros. The first phase of the extension of the cruise ship pier was one of these investments.

Deepening the port to accommodate the massive hulls involves dredging the seabed where the waste of decades of activity in Greece’s main commercial port has settled. We now know that the sludge in the barges which Vini witnessed probably constitutes most of the 293,000 cubic meters of mud which COSCO was given permission by the Greek authorities to dispose of at sea. 

The chemical analysis submitted as part of the licensing application found that the mud from the seabed contained high concentrations of mercury and other heavy metals, at levels harmful to public health. Τhe COSCO-owned PPA, however, had been dumping it at sea with the blessings of the relevant Greek authorities – the Environment Ministry, the Ministry of Shipping, the Decentralised Administration of Attica and the Central Coastguard of Piraeus. 

Worse still, the coordinates set out in the environmental license for the disposal define an area in the middle of the Saronic Gulf which is crisscrossed daily by fishing boats, supplying the markets and restaurants of Athens and the islands with fish and seafood. 

Citizens of Piraeus who were not happy with the environmental terms of the project, as well as with other projects in the port, have appealed to the Council of State, the Greek supreme administrative court. A decision by the court is due shortly. 

“Absolutely no pollution issues”

PPA was granted a license by the Coastguard to dispose of the mud dredged from the harbour on 11 March 2020 on the basis of chemical analysis of the sediments from the harbour floor. 

Reporters United has seen the January 2018 technical report on the results of the chemical analysis, which was produced by the Laboratory of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) under Emeritus Professor Aggeliki Moutsatsou. The report (which can be found here in Greek) concludes that “disposal of (the dredged materials) is possible with absolutely no pollution issues”. 

Other experts that Reporters United has spoken to, however, claim that the concentrations of heavy metals found in the sediment exceed the toxicity limits set in international standards. Biochemist Vassilios Tselentis is Professor of Marine Environment and head of the Laboratory of Marine Sciences at the University of Piraeus. His own study of the chemical analysis shows that concentrations of chromium, nickel, zinc, arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead in many cases exceed ERM (effect-range median) limits set out in international standards – the values above which they are known to cause irreversible damage to 65% of marine organisms. 

Reporters United also showed the results to Michalis Leotsinidis, a chemist, Professor of Hygiene and Director of the Laboratory of Hygiene at Patra University. Professor Leotsinidis explains, “the TEL (threshold effect level) of mercury – one of the indices used to determine safety limits – is 0.13 mg/kg according to the standards used in Florida. At 6 mg/kg, the concentrations found in Piraeus are 46 times the limit”. 

Danger to public health

Professor Vassilios Kapsimalis is head of research at the Oceanography Institute of the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCMR), the state agency tasked with monitoring water quality. The HCMR advised the Greek Environment Ministry to introduce a program of environmental monitoring of the disposal area. Until then, it suggested that the ministry should “consider limiting fishing activities with slider fishing nets in the specific location’ (where the dredging spoil was disposed of). Reporters United asked Professor Kapsimalis why HCMR made this recommendation. He explained that fish and shellfish concentrate mercury in their bodies, a process known as bioaccumulation.

“If these metals are able to escape from the seabed and become suspended once again, they could enter the food chain. From one link of the food chain to the other, they bioaccumulate, so that even if they are found in low concentrations in the water, for example 1 mg/lt, they can reach 1,000 mg/kg as they accumulate between the plankton and the fish”.

Such levels can cause mercury poisoning in marine organisms and the humans who consume them and cause permanent serious damage to the central nervous system. 

Kapsimalis adds that for this reason the London and Barcelona Protocols for the protection of the sea recommend avoiding the disposal of the products of dredging in areas with intensive fishing activity.

According to the Panhellenic Association of Public Sector Ichthyologists, the area of Piraeus and the surrounding islands is exploited by around 750 commercial fishing vessels, while it is also home to 20 fish farms and 16 fish processing and wholesale businesses which supply not only the greater Athens area but many parts of the country. 

“This”, according to Professor Leotsinidis, “raises serious issues for those who carried out the analysis and granted the disposal license”.

A license to pollute?

Reporters United asked the Environment Ministry why the chemical analysis carried out by NTUA was able to give COSCO the green light to dispose of toxic sludge in some of Greece’s busiest fishing waters.

The Ministry directed us to the Joint Ministerial Decision of May 2006, which set out the terms of the original environmental license for the Piraeus Port Master Plan, while the PPA was still under Greek state control. The document (available here in Greek) makes the PPA responsible for commissioning the chemical analysis and specifies the methodology to be applied (the full response from the Ministry for the Environment is available here in Greek). 

The license specifies the use of leachability testing, which essentially involves bringing solid samples (e.g. soil) in contact with water to determine what contaminants are released. This is the method used in the NTUA study which cleared the sludge for disposal, and by other studies of the Piraeus sediments commissioned since 2006. There are, however, known problems with this approach. 

Biochemist Vassilios Tselentis raised the issue in a report dated June 16, 2020 (available here in Greek), in which he explained why leachability testing is not recommended in relation to disposing of solid waste at sea:

“Compared to other criteria or international standards, the concentration of heavy metals in the sediments examined by NTUA were many times over safe limits. The leachability testing allows them to state that there are heavy metals present, but that they do not leach out. This is wrong, because leaching is not the only mechanism by which they can be released in the marine environment. Microorganisms can metabolise the material in the seabed and release toxic substances this way”.

This method was selected based on EU Council Decision 2003/33/EC. According to sources at the Environment Ministry who spoke on background, this was the only way for the authorities to be able to provide for criteria, as to whether the dredges are hazardous or not. This decision, however, applies to the disposal of waste through burial on dry land, not disposal at sea. 

The same ministry sources also told Reporters United that the Greek state should already have set national limits or standards for the concentration of heavy metals in dredging spoils, based on which it could be determined whether they can be disposed of at sea. This has not happened to this date. 

In fact, the problem with treating dredging spoils in Greece goes deeper, and dates back at least twenty years. 

Lost in translation

Reporters United also found that Greek law has no separate designation for dredging spoils. This is due to a sloppy transposition of the European Waste Catalogue, the typology which has determined since 2000 which materials are treated as hazardous waste according to EU legislation. As the German International Development Agency GIZ pointed out in a report to the Greek government in August 2020, the Greek translation misclassifies dredging spoils as “excavation debris”. 

In practical terms, this means that dredging spoils are not treated as potentially hazardous waste, and can be disposed of following a general rule at a depth of 50 metres just one nautical mile from the shoreline. 

According to Haris Mourkakos, director of the southern Greek chapter of Greece’s construction waste management agency AANEL, this misclassification could potentially affect the treatment of around 2.5 million tonnes of waste annually. 

A different testing methodology could reject disposal at sea for the Piraeus sediments in favour of other, potentially more costly, options, which could add to the expense of the project for COSCO. However, HCMR and other experts, along with environmentalists and local activists, are concerned that the current methodology has already cost the environment dear.

The real risks

In an opinion paper and annex requested by the Environment Ministry in order to revise regulations for sea dredges in Piraeus, HCMR has recommended that the ministry adopt temporary standards for heavy metal concentrations for waste disposal at sea, based on those used by France and Italy, while waiting for permanent standards to be set. 

The chemical concentrations of the sea dredges excavated from Piraeus exceed these limits in six out of eight heavy metals that the HCMR and other experts recommend to be measured, citing the Dumping Protocol of the Barcelona Convention: chromium, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, lead and copper. A seventh, nickel, appears in concentrations between the middle and upper limit. Only zinc appears within safe limits. According to the HCMR, when “the concentration of one of the pollutants exceeds AL2 limits, the material must not be disposed of at sea, and must be subjected to containment (burial or covering), processing or management on land”.

Comparing the findings with other international standards – for example those used in the Netherlands – leads to similar results. Heavy metal concentrations in the samples exceed the limits for dangerous waste. 

In the minutes of an earlier discussion on the treatment of dredging spoil with the Piraeus Port regulator, which has since been abolished, Professor Kapsimalis summarised the situation created by the gaps in legislation (the minutes are available here in Greek):

“We who analyse the chemical composition of dredging spoils see ridiculously high readings by scientific standards, I mean sky-high. At the same time, someone who has undertaken their disposal can tell us that the material is not hazardous based on Greek legislation, because there are no legally defined pollution limits”. He goes on to say, “If the materials are not clean, there is a procedure which must be followed, and this is set out in detail in published guidelines specifically for Mediterranean countries. Everyone uses them except Greece. We are guided by legislation enacted in 1978-79 and nothing more. In scientific terms, we are a laughing stock”. 

No consultation

There are other problems with the way the disposal permit was granted, too.

Reporters United obtained from the Environment Ministry the Environmental Impact Study (available here in Greek) submitted by the PPA in 2011 in support of its original application for extension of Piraeus harbour including the building of the cruise terminal. 

The study has several problematic areas, not least of which it relies on chemical analysis of sediment from a different area of the harbour than the proposed site of the cruise terminal. It also grossly underestimates the amount of waste expected to come from the dredging – just 10,000 cubic metres compared to the 300,000 cubic metres in the disposal license. 

This Environmental study was also omitted from the legally required public consultation process, which took place in 2012 prior to the granting of the original permission for the harbour extension in 2013. This information, along with other supporting evidence, was transferred from the ministry to the Decentralised Administration of Attica in 2018, marked for publication “with no requirement for consultation”. 

The only time that the NTUA study with the actual results from the dredges of the cruise port excavation was included in a public consultation was when the PPA (by this time controlled by COSCO) submitted an updated Environmental Impact Study in 2019 in order to renew the environmental license for the port redevelopment Master Plan. At this point, the cruise pier had already been approved. 

It turns out this is not the first time that dredging spoils were disposed of by COSCO-PPA in the same patch of sea. In 2016 the Environment Ministry licensed the disposal of 100,000 cubic metres of dredging spoils from the construction of Pier III. The same NTUA lab had carried out the analysis using the same methodology, and gave the same verdict: the material could be disposed of at sea “without causing any pollution issues” (the report is available here in Greek). 

The chemical analysis showed toxic levels of chromium, nickel, copper and zinc according to international standards. 

After the event

After examining legal challenges mounted by two separate citizens’ groups, the Council of State, Greece’s highest administrative court, halted the dredging activities on June 11. However, in the intervening weeks it appears that most of the damage was already done. 

In December 2020, after the Council of State halted the dredging, the Environment Ministry published updated environmental terms for the project, in which it adopts the HCMS’s recommendation to “harmonise” the NTUA study with international limits, and requires the PPA to submit a new technical study, potentially requiring additional analyses of the harbour sediment. The new terms (available here in Greek) also recommend a two-year programme of environmental monitoring as recommended by the HCMS.

The HCMS had also recommended a freeze on fishing in the area during the monitoring period. This was not endorsed by the ministry.  

The ministry also rejects the HCMS recommendation to adopt temporary concentration limits for heavy metals, which are based on the national limits of France for heavy metals. When Reporters United asked why, the ministry responded that “the adoption of nationally-applicable measures is not possible in the context of granting an environmental license for a specific project”, claiming that they chose to apply the guidelines on the management of waste set out in the Barcelona Convention. The reply of the Ministry can be found, in Greek, here.

The Barcelona convention does not endorse any country limits, but refers to the national limits used by France, Italy and Spain. A comparison with the limits of Italy and Spain shows that the waste deposited in the Saronic gulf clearly exceeds the limits for between 4 and 7 of the 8 elements measured.  

However, the damage has already been done, as it appears that most of the dredging waste was already disposed of by the time the work was stopped. 

Exactly how much material was disposed of is hard to establish. PPA has avoided giving a direct response (twice) to the question sent by Reporters United (full correspondence is available here in Greek). The Central Coastguard of Piraeus, who issued the final approval for the disposal, also avoided answering our question, and so has the Environment Ministry.

However, a source at the ministry told Reporters United that the contractor had already disposed of around 70% of the dredged material. 

In addition, Anthi Giannoulou, a Piraeus lawyer who has represented the citizens in one of the appeals made at the Council of State, has gathered evidence from eyewitnesses suggesting that the dredging continued illegally after the court order was issued. 

The Council of State is due to issue a final decision on dredging and other environmental objections concerning the port investments shortly. If it rejects the appeals by the citizens of Piraeus, it will give leeway to PPA to complete the investment of the cruise ship pier, already facilitated by a recent amendment to the concession agreement with COSCO, which provided a five to ten years extension period.

The cruise ship pier was one of the so-called mandatory investments that COSCO had to conclude by this summer in order to gain another 16% stake of Piraeus Port Authority. Having failed to do so, this fall the Chinese state company was granted the stake anyway, 

for 88 million euros plus 11.87 million euros in accrued interest and a letter of guarantee of 29 million, after legislation which amended the initial concession agreement was passed this September. 

The Greek legislators who voted for the amended agreement, putting it into law (the draft text of which is available here in Greek), in fact accepted COSCO’s reasoning that the delays were due to factors “beyond reasonable control of the PPA”. This seems to be implying that the court appeals are disconnected from and irrelevant to the environmental decisions made by the PPA and its contractors.

Το άρθρο How Chinese giant COSCO has been dumping dangerous waste off the Athenian coastline with the government’s permission εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.

“Name your three favourite places in Greece, then look at the map of the Greek Energy Regulator. There is most probably a wind farm planned there”, says Dimitris Gotsis, a design engineer and outdoors activities guide from the Peloponnese, who is spending his days and nights researching planned wind farms in Greece.

Wind turbines at an elevation between 1,700 and 2,000 metres on a mountain range so unspoilt that its name is Agrafa (meaning “blank slate”). Wind turbines along the entire spine of the island of Amorgos, where the Luc Besson movie “Le Grand Bleu” was filmed. Wind turbines on 23 protected islets of the Aegean, prized as invaluable bird sanctuaries due to the complete lack of human footprint. On the island of Andros, a hiking paradise, enough wind power to cover the needs of the island almost ten times over. On the mountain of Oiti, a wind farm inside the National Park. Wind turbines on 80% of the peaks of Pindos, the mountain range that runs through the entire Greek mainland.

These are among the approximately 9,000 new turbines that are in the advanced stages of the process to obtain permits, or the approximately 7,000 turbines at the initial assessment stage by the Greek authorities. The average output of the individual planned turbines is almost 3 ΜW and their average height is 150 metres, while some reach 250 metres at the tip of the blade (the Eiffel tower is 300 metres high). This is in addition to the 2,500 turbines that have been installed over the past few years, at a total installed capacity of 4.34 GW. Production from all turbines currently seeking permission exceeds even the most ambitious green transition goals and is also totally unrealistic given the constraints of the grid. Nevertheless, every couple of months, hundreds of new applications are being submitted. 

Wind power companies say there is nothing to worry about.“Only a small percentage of applications lead to the construction of actual wind farms” points out Panagiotis Papastamatiou, CEO of the Hellenic Wind Energy Association, the industry lobby group. “We are in favour of strict selection.”

As of February 2021, wind farm projects totaling 30.49GW have paid the required fees and have a production permit. The environment ministry has recently offered developers the option to return the permit and get their money back, a process that might help clear the field, weeding out around 20% of projects, according to industry estimates. Yet more applications might fail to secure the funding guarantees required by the new law. This would still leave at least 20 GW of wind projects on track for construction. In the end, the head of Greece’s energy regulator, RAE, Athanasios Dagoumas, estimates around 10% to 20% of all wind and solar applications (currently exceeding a whopping 100 GW) will be built. 

Location, location, location

The question, of course, is by which criteria the selection is determined. Even if only 10%-20% of applications lead to construction, it makes an enormous difference where this construction takes place. Without any way to set priorities, the current system essentially operates on a “first come, first served” basis. From an environmental standpoint, this means that valuable habitats could be damaged while there are less sensitive locations available. 

The environmental viability of a project needs to be determined at the earliest possible stage, before any construction starts. Even if a project stops midway, after new roads have been opened, the damage to biodiversity is already done. 

There is broad agreement that the current system doesn’t work. If land use in Greece is a black hole, then land use rules for renewables are a black hole within a black hole. The conservative government led by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has turned down the request of 9 environmental NGOs for a moratorium in new construction of wind parks and other large infrastructure in Natura 2000 areas (already, 190 parks with 700 turbines are operating in these protected areas). The government has, however, initiated a review of the vague and outdated rules that allowed companies to prioritise investment in the most pristine areas of the global biodiversity hotspot that is Greece. Will the new rules be any better? Will they come soon enough? 

“Wind power is by definition friendly to the environment,” says Papastamatiou. “We do not build nuclear plants, we do not drill, we have zero carbon footprint”. 

In the University of Ioannina, situated amongst some of the most impressive mountains of Greece, Professor of Biodiversity Conservation and Head of Biodiversity Conservation Lab, Vassiliki Kati, sees things differently. 

Kati has spent decades studying Greece’s wildlife and she has seen the detrimental effects of road construction on species such as the Balkan chamois. Each wind farm in the middle of nowhere requires several kilometres of new roads, leading to fragmentation of valuable ecosystems, increasing artificial surfaces and facilitating other damaging activities, such as illegal hunting, logging and construction. Unlike most of northern Europe, Greece still has expansive roadless areas but fragmentation of the greek landscape proceeds faster than the european average.

“We have two equally important imperatives, stopping climate change and arresting the biodiversity decline. We need more convergence between these two goals” says Kati. Her team recently suggested a concrete way to reconcile the two. In a peer-reviewed paper for the journal Science of the Total Environment she proposed an exclusion zone of ecologically sensitive areas, comprising 58,6% of the country, where no wind farms are allowed, leaving the rest as a potential investment zone. 

Instead of a case-by-case appraisal of applications, as demanded by wind power companies, Kati proposes a horizontal rule. There is ample evidence documenting the mortal threats to biodiversity posed by land use change and habitat fragmentation. Plus, according to Kati, rules protecting entire ecosystems are better suited to addressing cumulative effects, which are underestimated if each wind farm is assessed independently. Adopting a horizontal rule would make the process more efficient for investors too, as it would mean they would not waste time, effort and money applying for wind turbines in areas protected by the Natura 2000 network of the EU, or in roadless and less fragmented areas.

Around 6 million data points from wind masts all over Greece  show only 4% higher wind speeds on high mountains and other areas in the proposed exclusion zone than in the proposed investment zone. Wind speed is only one indicator when choosing appropriate locations, but what the 4% number shows is that the wind potential inside the investment zone should not be dismissed as inadequate.

Could this average value be misleading? Probably not. One can only assume wind companies have measured location-specific wind conditions before applying for permits, otherwise the plans would make no business sense. By this calculation, there are enough applications in the investment zone proposed by Kati to shift Greece to 100% clean energy.   

How much wind power do we need?

Specifically, as of March 2020, before the massive recent rounds of applications, there were already  applications for 10.7 GW of wind power in the investment zone. According to the National Long-Term Energy Strategy (LTS-2050, available in Greek here) Greece has submitted to the EU, fully covering Greece’s energy needs with clean energy would require an extra 8.9 GW of wind power from the current starting point (4.2 GW existing, 8.4 GW new terrestrial, 0.5GW offshore) of installed wind power by 2050 – or by 2040, if the government chooses to bring forward this goal, as environmental organisations suggest it should.  

Needless to say, applications in the investment zone submitted by March 2020 were also overshooting the current modest national target for 2030 (total installed capacity 7 GW of wind power), as well as the stricter revisions of the 2030 target, expected this fall in order to bring Greece in line with the EU’S  “Fit for 55” targets. “Suggesting an investment zone doesn’t delay wind power roll-out” says Kati “it is a win-win proposition.”

 This is not quite true. There are two losers from these calculations, which is why the wind power industry is keen to reject the proposal. One is the vision of Greece as a clean energy “hub”, touted by wind-power executives (for example by the head of GEK Terna, in Greek here) and by Mitsotakis himself (in 2019 the soon-to-be prime minister called for Greece to become “The battery of Europe”). This relates to a notion whereby Greece systematically generates and stores excess electricity from renewable sources like wind with a view to exporting it. The second is the idea that green transition is tied to the development and subsequent massive deployment of “middleman fuels”, like hydrogen and yet-to-be invented synthetic fuels. Neither of these notions is essential for Greece to meet its climate goals.  

Inside Greece, Kati’s proposal has been dismissed as leading to less wind power generation than the amounts necessary for a zero-emissions economy. But here is the catch. These amounts are not fixed, but rather depend on policy choices. The maximalist scenario in the Long Term Strategy (in terms of its requirement for renewables) is the one dubbed “New Carriers 1.5”, which relies heavily on the use of renewables to generate “green” hydrogen and other “middleman” fuels, rather than direct electrification using more proven – and more efficient – technologies like batteries and pumped storage.  This doubles the amount of installed wind power required to cover demand.

The alternative “Efficiency & Electrification 1.5” scenario outlined in the Long-Term Strategy, in which renewable power is used for direct electrification, estimates that Greece needs an extra 8.9 GW of wind and 11 GW of solar power in order to cover the most stringent 2050 goals. Wind projects that have received a production permit as of 2021 cover the 2050 target for wind power more than three times over. 

Reconciling biodiversity and climate protection 

More than unfettered access to every mountain peak and every wind-swept island in the country, investors prize certainty. They wish to know in which areas it will be permitted to place wind farms and in which areas it will not. When – and if – the current, vaguely regulated free-for-all comes to an end and rules are put in place, what should these rules look like? What are the guidelines that would make wind energy not only renewable but also sustainable? 

Lazaros Georgiadis, a biologist from Florina, North Western Greece and co-author of a recent report on “Biodiversity in the Balkan Peninsula”, suggests that no wind farm should be built without a proper impact assessment, determining that the impacts are reversible. “If a wind farm causes irreversible biodiversity loss, then it fails the sustainability criterion and it should not be built”, he says, cautioning that biodiversity is unrelated to the mass of the animal, meaning small grasshoppers or butterflies are just as valuable as large bears. It is imperative that maps pointing out sensitive areas for biodiversity and overlays with planned wind farms are drawn for the entire country. One region, Western Macedonia, already has such a map. It looks like this: 

The conflict points are easy to spot: they are the orange circles, showing wind farms planned inside sensitive areas. What this map reveals is that sensitive areas are not only those included in the Natura 2000 network of protected areas (green and red stripes) but also the corridors connecting these protected areas. “Animals do not live in glass jars, they move around.” says Georgiadis. There are two types of corridors, one on land (grey color) and one in the sky (bird migration route, brown color). These should be respected – but currently they are not.  

At the far north of the area depicted on the map, right at the intersection of a bird migration route and an ecological land corridor used by bears and other animals, lies Nymphaio, the gem of local mountain tourism. In June 2021, the environment ministry gave the go-ahead for a wind farm at this spot (not marked by an orange circle because the map uses 2015 data for wind farm applications, missing many of the most recent ones). 

The Nymphaio project was approved, inviting a lawsuit by environmental organisations, just a few days after the Environment Ministry stopped in its tracks the application for a mega wind project on 23 islets of the Aegean, pointing out that the islands’ rich bird habitats could be irreversibly damaged (see RUs report on the “Mediterranean Galapagos”). “There is a war going on, we may win some battles, but the war is everywhere”, says Georgiadis, pondering the cascade of applications for wind farms all over Greece’s mountaintops. Georgiadis has his own suggestions.

He believes a National Master Plan for Renewable Energy should be created, to underpin the permitting process by setting priorities at a strategic level. Georgiadis also argues that Special Area Plans should be drawn up for each region, while the impacts of wind farms already in place should be properly monitored, paying special attention to the cumulative nature of the effects on biodiversity. It is also necessary in his view to engage the stakeholders, abide by the law (no cutting corners under the guise of “fast-tracking”) and, finally, going beyond biodiversity, the planning system should take landscape into account, preserving areas of exceptional natural beauty.

A Νational Αrea Plan for renewable Energy and several Special Area Plans for many regions  are now being drafted, but there is a huge question mark as to whether there are enough resources devoted in this process to make them fit for purpose. The contract for evaluating the old National Area Plan for Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and drafting the new one is costed at 130,000 euros (in Greek here), a very small amount for a project of this scope and scale. Two years on, the plan is still being drafted, while another project, aiming to finally pinpoint the exact coordinates of the already existing exclusion areas (archaeological sites etc.) is costed at 186,000 euros (in Greek, here), again a paltry sum given the absence of precise data for large swaths of the Greek territory.

It is in the knowledge of these gaps that Kati proposed a priori excluding 58.6% of the Greek territory from new wind farm development, since most sensitive areas do in fact fall within this 58.6% of Natura 2000 sites and least fragmented territories.   

Most importantly, critics of the government’s approach point out that a plan regulating land use for renewable energy (which will eventually be in place, however incomplete) is not the same as a National Master plan for Energy Transition. Such a Master Plan would take into account the country’s total energy needs, potential for savings through efficiency and goals for lowering emissions. It could outline alternative scenarios, answering the following question: how much wind power is really necessary for the transition to zero emissions and to what extent the transition can be accomplished through RES already in place and through new production located on artificial surfaces, rather than unspoilt natural features. Such installations are already foreseen, both at utility scale – such as those planned for the former lignite mines in Northern Greece and the Peloponnese – and smaller, decentralized plants and rooftop installations. Prioritising such schemes over virgin installations could substantially reduce the need to venture close to sensitive ecosystems and pristine mountaintops. 

The first question should not be where it would be optimal to place wind turbines in Greece’s mountains, but how many are really needed, after the potential for energy efficiency, for less invasive installations for solar and wind power in locations already altered by human intervention, for hydropower and geothermal generation, is exhausted. 

Kati’s approach shows there is ample space for the Greek government to both lead Greece to 100% renewable energy and protect its most valuable habitats. All it needs to do is let go of the idea of Greece as a green energy “hub”. It also needs to focus on the realistic scenario of energy efficiency and electrification, rather than on a highly speculative hydrogen-plus-new-fuels-powered future. There is no need to clip wind power investors’ wings, just to bring their profit motive in line with the preservation of Greece’s biodiversity and pristine beauty. 

A shorter version of this article was published in German by the NZZ.

Το άρθρο Too much of a good thing? Wind power and the battle for Greece’s wild heart εμφανίστηκε πρώτα στο R•U.