In Greece, Who Knows?
Not long
ago Leonidas Hamodrakas, a lawyer in Athens, decided to pay closer attention to
his family’s land holdings — some fields, a scattering of buildings and a
massive stone tower — in Mani, a rural region in southern Greece.
But property
ownership in Greece is often less than clear cut. So Mr. Hamodrakas put a
padlock on his gate and waited to see what would happen. Soon enough, he heard
from neighbors. Three of them claimed that they, too, had title to parts of the
property.
In this age of
satellite imagery, digital records and the instantaneous exchange of
information, most of Greece’s land transaction records are still handwritten in
ledgers, logged in by last names. No lot numbers. No clarity on boundaries or
zoning. No obvious way to tell whether two people, or 10, have registered
ownership of the same property.
As Greece tries to
claw its way out of an economic crisis of historic proportions, one that has
left 60 percent of young people without jobs, many experts cite the lack of a
proper land registry as one of the biggest impediments to progress. It scares
off foreign investors; makes it hard for the state to privatize its assets, as
it has promised to do in exchange for bailout money; and makes it virtually
impossible to collect property taxes.
Greece has
resorted to tagging tax dues on to electricity bills as a way to flush out
owners. Of course, that means that empty property and farmland has yet to be
taxed.
Mr. Hamodrakas is
far from resolving the dispute with his neighbors. The courts in Greece are
flooded with such cases. “These things take years,” he said, “maybe a decade to
settle.”
This state of
affairs is particularly galling because Greece has thrown hundreds of millions
of dollars at the problem over the past two decades, but has little to show for
it. At one point, in the early 1990s, Greece took more than $100 million from
the European Union to build a registry. But after seeing what was accomplished,
the European Union demanded its money back.
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