The government representative, Pavlos Marinakis, spoke, among others, to SKAI and the show Live You about the government’s financial announcements, specifically housing.

He stated that “some of them are already being implemented, all the rest are being launched immediately” noting that today there will be an internal meeting on the subject of schools, the Marietta Giannakou program and the basic work that needs to be done in schools across the country .

Regarding housing, the government representative underlined that it is one of the biggest problems of all European countries and stated that “the prime minister did not deal with it purely in terms of benefits”. He explained that government interventions can be divided into 2 categories.

One is the direct support to citizens, households, students such as the increase in allowances for students, interventions in the housing allowance, child allowance and interventions that have to do with the immediate strengthening of citizens’ income for the great issue of housing .

Regarding whether house rent prices can be controlled (eg in a 70-80 square meter house we may see 800-1000 euro rent), he stated that “this can be limited” in 2 ways. “One way is to support as much as you can by reformulating your benefit policy, that is, taking money from the unemployment benefit in the way that will be idealized by the co-competent ministries.”

The second part, as he explained, does not start in the fifth to sixth year of the Mitsotakis administration, but simply intensifies now more and has to do with a series of interventions such as the “Spiti my” 1 – 2 program, the 400 million euro energy upgrade program for closed houses, “which we want to hit the market at zero interest.”

The closed houses will be opened with incentives from the state

He mentioned that the closed houses – which he said are too many, “there is an analysis that talks about 500,000 closed properties throughout Greece”, are opened with incentives from the state such as zero tax for 3 years for someone to open a house, noting that only now we have 12 new tax reductions, “those announced yesterday in continuation of the previous 50 of the previous four years and another 10 in the first year. The Mitsotakis government has now announced the abolition or reduction of 70 taxes”. He added that “you turn the short-term lease into a long-term lease and you also have a tax exemption for 3 years while he also spoke about the utilization of public property in the logic of consideration.

Mr. Marinakis stated, among other things, that “Greece was a bankrupt country. Greece was a country that, in order for the world to listen to us, 70% of private sector employees had gotten to receive less than 1,000 euros. Now this has fortunately fallen to 54%” and added:

“From bankrupt to today, we are the country with the fastest rate of unemployment reduction. These 500,000 jobs with better wages, not the ones we want, but better wages, bring money, bring money to the state so that we can also talk about some targeted benefits, such as housing benefits.”