Rena Dourou was elected regional governor of Attica because the residents of the country’s largest prefecture had been convinced, to a certain degree, that she would fulfill her promise to clash with big business interests, that are ravaging a region of 5 million people.
However, the first sample of her governance has disappointed those that believed her. On Thursday, October 23, the regional council was convened to approve the 2015 budget. Addressing the council, Ms Dourou spoke of the new prefecture’s most important political decision: Money makes the world go round.
And what exactly did Ms Dourou and the other Syriza members claim? That the time they had at their disposal, since assuming office until last week’s vote, had not been sufficient to draft the budget as they would have liked. Therefore, they put the plan prepared by her predecessors to a vote and made some symbolic amendments concerning certain funds. “We chose to remove whatever could be removed – which did not concern contracts. We chose to change whatever could be changed. We are choosing to add whatever is possible, so as to imprint a first sample of our orientation – that is, development with a social tag and environmental alertness in conditions of deep financial and social crisis”.
In that spirit, probably, Ms Dourou decided to keep the funding of two much-discussed projects in her budget. The first is the restoration of the football stadium for Panathinaikos FC, one of the top three professional soccer clubs in the country, in the center of Athens (€7 million for the construction of VIP suites and other similar additions…).
One could say that Ms Dourou and her party can be redeemed by the fact that there indeed was a contract signed between the prefecture and Panathinaikos FC for the project and that she could not break it.
However, a few weeks ago, a court deemed the funding of the project illegal in an audit it had conducted. Or was it that she was influenced by the meeting, held in a spirit of common understanding (a joint announcement was issued) with Mr Alafouzos – essentially a shipowner who is also the boss of Panathinaikos FC and a businessman controlling ‘Kathimerini’ newspaper and SKAI TV station?
Whatever Mr Dourou was thinking, the project remains in the region’s budget. Her ‘clash with interests’ is somewhat a velvety one.
The second case, and even more scandalous, is the one concerning the football stadium for AEK FC (yet another of the country’s top three soccer clubs) planned for construction in the Nea Philadelphia suburb by the company “Dikefalos 1924 SA” of controversial businessman Dimitris Melissanidis (a magnate of the Aegean Shipping group).
Read here a Special Report by ThePressProject International on Mr Melissanidis.
In this case, Ms. Dourou’s predecessor, Mr Sgouros, had offered Melissanidis €20 million, and integrated the project, in the summer of 2013, in the prefecture’s technical programme – which was to be implemented with prefecture funds. In this case, there was no contract which could be cited as a justification by the new prefecture authority (anyhow, with whom could there have been a contract with, given that Dikefalos 1924 SA has no right over the stretch of land where the stadium is planned for construction?)
Ms Dourou and her party said on March 24 – two months before regional elections – that: “Let everyone be reminded that the plot of land upon which the stadium will be built belongs to AEK Club [the non-professional entity], which will receive nothing for it. Let us also remind everyone, that the new stadium will not be the property of AEK SA [the professional football entity], but of a private company belonging to multi-millionaire Melissanidis and will remain in his hands even if he abandons the club. AEK and its supporters should steer clear of the games being played by modern-day kodjabashis [local Christian notables in parts of Ottoman Greece] and proestoi [primates]. Apart from being fans, they are also citizens living under a new slavery”.
One would expect from this fiery language, that it would have led to the removal of this project from the prefecture’s technical programme for 2015.Woe to those that hoped so. It never happened. Ms Dourou kept the project, clarifying, in the relevant official lists, that those undertaking the project (meaning those that get the money) will be ‘Various’…
Of course, Ms Dourou mentioned the environmental tag of her policy. As did the deputy governor Mr Karamanos, who said, with much pomp and honour, that Ms Dourou’s faction was able to include a fund of €750,000 in the 2015 budget for the ‘protection and restoration’ of Nea Philadelphia park. It must be noted that for the stadium’s construction, Greek parliament voted through – favouritism-tinged – legislation that concedes a section of the area’s protected forest park to AEK FC for free, so it can expand its plot (also conceded to the club free of charge in 1934) and create space for the building it plans to construct.
With the same law (Ν.4277/14, Regulatory Plan for Athens-Attica), the municipal park forest of Nea Philadelphia will change hands and end up in the possession of the somewhat vaguely-termed “Management Body of Metropolitan and Local Parks of Attica” with the ultimate goal – as we know very well from other park management bodies of Attica – of depreciating the park, carving plots of land and altering its definition as a forest park, in order to hand it over to small and large business interests – Mr Melissanidis being no exception.
Ms Dourou and her associates made no mention of this, neither in the pre-election nor in the post-election period. Only Mr Karamanos tried to ‘murmur’ something about reforming the budget in January, in an effort to allay negative impressions at the meeting of the Regional Council.
This, of course, does not answer the questions that are beginning to be raised by Attica residents – among them the voters of Ms Dourou’s ‘Dynami Zois’ platform. Now that she has the prefecture’s authority in her hands, just where is Ms Dourou going with this?
And what will Syriza do when, sooner or later, it comes to power?