Land register
by 2010
But property owners
will have to pay over 1 billion euros to fund project
Some eight years after
Greece was promised its first land register, the government
unveiled detailed plans to
get the project, bedeviled by delays and arguments,
back on track but with property owners covering the
majority of its cost.
Greece and Albania
are the only two European countries not to have a
land register and, in the case of Greece,
that is despite having received some 100 million euros
in funding from the European Union to create one.
In a scheme PASOK
referred to as “Greece’s biggest major
public works project,” Costas Laliotis, then
public
works minister, promised in 1997 that 5 million hectares
of land would be on the register by 2000, but the
project barely got off the ground and in 2001 the
EU asked for its money back.
The creation of a
land register has great political significance as
well as practical importance for the ruling conservatives.
“It is a fundamental project for our country
since it is the key tool for planning, correct organization
and development of the country,” said Public
Works Minister Giorgos Souflias.
According to the plans,
property owners will be required to pay a flat fee
of 35 euros and then 0.14 percent of
20,000 euros less than the objective value of their
home or land so the property can be registered. If
the title
deeds are owned by more than one person, they will
all have to pay the registration fee.
This money will go
to covering almost 1.1 billion euros of the whole
project’s expected total cost of 1.39 billion
euros. Souflias said the EU has refused to make any
funds available this time.
The minister said
every effort would be made to keep Greeks living abroad
informed about the process so they
could register any property they own in Greece. He
said that a special system would be devised for Greek
Australians so that ownership of their property would
be recognized but not included on the land register
so they do
not miss out on their pensions in Australia.
Souflias
pledged that the bulk of the registration (Attica,
Thessaloniki and the capitals of Greece’s prefectures)
would be carried out by 2010.
