Annual property tax payment notices were electronically sent to roughly seven million owners with at least one holding to their name in Greece over the weekend.
The independent public revenue authority stepped up the dispatch of the notices in order to give taxpayers (roughly 6.3 million) and legal entities more time to cover the pending obligation, as it stated in a press release.
In breaking down the statement, the total sum imposed on property owners for 2017 in Greece comes to 3.153 billion euros, of which 2.7 billion are owed by individuals and 448 million by legal entities, such as companies, funds, non-profit institutions etc.
Reductions and exclusions from the unpopular property tax, known as ENFIA in its Greek-language acronym, are only worth 88.9 million euros, and affect 1.3 million property owners – with 1.24 million given a 50-percent discount, and approximately 66,000 enjoying a 100-percent discount.
The ENFIA tax has been one of the most unpopular taxes imposed in Greece over recent memory, with the previous Samaras government losing much of its popularity over the measure, and with the then leftist SYRIZA party promising to abolishing the tax “in full”, when it was in the opposition.
Nevertheless, following the signing of the third memorandum by the current SYRIZA-led leftist-rightist government, the ENFIA tax has been entrenched even more.