By Yannis Anifantis

In the bill for the “New Development Program of Public Investments” which is being discussed today in the Plenary the amendment of the Ministry of Finance was submitted for the completion of the works of the electric interconnection of Crete – Cyprus.

The purpose of the provision is to prevent the suspension of work under the construction contracts concluded, demonstrating the strong will of the government’s financial staff for the uninterrupted continuation of work.

The regulation provides that ADMIE SA, as the implementing body of the project of common interest for Greece and the EU concerning the Cyprus-Crete electrical interconnection, “makes the payments required for the continuation of the works within the framework of the construction contracts it has entered into, until in the amount of 26.8 million euros, in parallel with the process of issuing the decisions of the relevant regulatory authorities of Greece and Cyprus to determine the regulated income of the project for 2025 and based on the current regulatory framework at the time of entry into force”.

As pointed out in Article 5 of the amendment “In case of delay or cancellation of the project due to external factors beyond the control, responsibility and fault of the implementing body and its contracted suppliers and contractors, the implementing body recovers through the state budget, a percentage of 13 %, of the total of realized and unrecovered investment and operational costs, so that the sum of the above percentage with the percentage recovered as provided in the relevant decision of the Waste, Energy and Water Regulatory Authority (R.A.A.E. Y.) to amount to 50% of the total of the above expenses”.

With the same provision, in article 1, the tax framework for private pleasure boats is reformed by zeroing out the tax rate for boats up to 7 meters and deleting the requirements in case the tax was not paid in the years 2020 – 2022.