Greece’s finance ministry is seriously studying the prospect of giving squatters of state land – most of whom have built illegal structures at the locations – the right to purchase the land outright. Such a development would directly and significantly boost the country’s now closely scrutinized public finances and, just as importantly for the poll-trailing leftist-rightist coalition government, serve as a very high-profile pre-election promise for tens of thousands of squatters, which have built everything from farm sheds to holiday villas with pools on the land.
A regularly scheduled general election in the country must be held in the second half of 2019.
At the same time, the plan would partially resolve, in favor of squatters, an issue that has been a scourge of modern Greece for decades. Despite generous EU funding up until the late 1990s, Greece still has not created a unified, functional and digitalized land registry (cadastre) throughout the country, among the very few states in the developed world without one. The EU Commission, in fact, ordered Athens to return hundreds of millions of euros in Union funding to Brussels in the late 1990s.
The first, albeit timid step, towards such a cash-for-squatted-land scheme came on Thursday, when a relevant finance ministry general secretary for public assets unveiled a decision foreseeing the creation of a work group that will convene and then table proposals on how to best exploit squatted state lands.
The decision specifically notes that the work group will “determine conditions and terms allowing unlawful squatters the opportunity to purchase illegally possessed state property, in order to ensure the permanent resolution of the relevant problem and to guarantee the public good.”
