Privatizing Greece

Sunday Telegraph:

As George Georgas drives his golf buggy along the sea front, the sprightly 80-year-old muses on why this is the best stretch of coast in the world.

The beach is the longest on the Greek island of Rhodes – four miles of crystal waters, flanked by a gently sloping pebble shore. The 18-hole golf course that flanks it is lined with olive trees and wild flowers, and there is scarcely a hotel or high rise in sight.

Mr Georgas has played here for over 30 years. And now he thinks the government should sell it.

"We are like a bankrupt housewife forced to sell the silver, to save the family," he said. "Greece has no choice."

The sale of the coast at Afandou is part of the Greek government's desperate attempts to raise money by privatising its vast portfolio of state-owned assets – the largest firesale in history. Some 70,000 lots are for sale, ranging from pristine stretches of coast through to royal palaces, marinas, thermal baths, ski resorts and entire islands. Only last Wednesday, bidding closed for a stake in the state gambling company.

On Monday Antonis Samaras, the prime minister, scraped through another round of negotiations with the Troika – the EU, IMF and European Central Bank – and managed to secure payment of the next EU 8.8 billion instalment of the bailout. But privatisation is a prerequisite for receiving the bailout funds.

On Rhodes, a mountainous island 50 miles long that was the mythical home of the sun god Apollo, huge chunks of prime real estate are now up for grabs. Beside the 1,850-hectare Afandou estate there is the peninsula of Prasonisi, a paradise for windsurfers, and the Mandraki marina in Rhodes Town, where the famous Colossus, a 100 foot high statue that was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, once stood guard over the port entrance.

Rhodes is unique in having nearly a third of its land owned by the government, a legacy of being occupied during the Italian invasion in 1912 and later having ownership of that land passed over to Athens when it became part of the modern Greek state. Yet that hasn't stopped the inspectors from Athens fanning out across the country to see what else they could auction off.

The idea of snapping up a Greek island certainly has its appeal. In March the Emir of Qatar bought six for £7 million, while a Russian oligarch bought Skorpios – previously owned by the Onassis family – earlier this month for a reported £65 million, as a present for his 24-year-old daughter Ekaterina Rybolovlev. While both those sales were private, it showed there was a potentially lucrative market for chunks of scenic Greece.

To that end, the royal palace on Corfu, where Prince Philip was born, is now also for sale. So too is a large coastal estate which, the government boasts on its website, is next door to land owned by the Rothschild banking dynasty.

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There is nothing like socialism to make a country poorer. But the privatizing will make it infinitely more prosperous in the coming year as the property will then be owned by taxpayers.  That will be somewhat unique for Greece, but it will be an improvement.