To the Minister of Interior Mr. Makis Voridis &
the Deputy Minister Interior Mr. Stelios Petsa
COMMON: The President of KEDE Mr. Dimitris Papastergiou &
the President of the Institutions Committee & KEDE’s Transparency Officer Mr. Grigori Constantellos
Here Athens, January 10, 2021
TOPIC: THE POMIDA for urgent and institutional issues concerning real estate and OTAs
Dear Ministers,
Along with our congratulations and our best wishes for success in your new duties, we consider it useful to inform you about the urgent matters to be resolved as well as the pending institutional issues of of your competence, concerning the properties and Top Organizations. Self-government of our country.
A. THE URGENT THINGS:
POMIDA becomes a daily recipient of strong protests from property owners from all over the country, who did not know and did not benefit from the favorable provisions that were in force with the proposal of POMIDA until recently, that today they are being asked by the Municipalities for astronomical sums after fines for retroactive municipal fees for cleaning, lighting and 12-year TAP, for undeclared areas and for non-electrified properties, due to the fact that the provisions that automatically came back into force are “draconian” and completely unenforceable, and in need of immediate amendment. In particular:
- BLANK & NON-ELECTRIFIED PROPERTIES: Exemption from council tax of non-electrified properties is the biggest problem for property owners, the vast majority of whom, elderly and especially in the periphery, unknowingly consider that a power cut in a property, also interrupts the obligation to pay municipal fees, as long as they believe in good faith that with the interruption of the electricity, the cash services of the relevant Municipality are automatically informed, as should be the case and as provided for. But in fact today the declaration exempts the owner from municipal cleaning fees & lighting only from the date of its submission to the revenue service, and not from the day of power failure, contrary to the previous provision of 2005, for which we had a 20-year struggle, which exempted the citizen retroactively and regardless of the time of filing of the responsible declaration, as the Ombudsman had also given an opinion.
Today, in the year 2021, there is only one way to deal with this matter. Given that all the Municipalities of the country have connected or have the possibility to connect to the ON LINE application of the DEDDIE for municipal fees, it should finally be legislated that a power cut also interrupts the charging of municipal fees, as long as the corresponding non- electrified space is not used, and if it is used without electricity, the owner or user will be obliged to declare this from the start of use, in order to be charged the corresponding fees. The services of the Municipalities can check compliance with the above obligation, by carrying out autopsies on every place that is reported to the DEDDIE terminal as not having electricity, or by requesting the presentation of retroactive tax and lease or other five-year data.
Consequently, for empty and non-electrified properties, the obligation to declare the owners must be abolished, and from the time of power supply interruption, known to the Municipalities from the OnLine connection with DEDDIE), an automatic exemption from the municipal cleaning and lighting fees, as long as they are also vacant.
- DECLARATION OF UNDEclared PROPERTY AREAS:Their inaccurate declaration for the imposition of municipal cleaning and lighting fees (usually five times higher for commercial use than for residential use!) incurs a 60% fine, the overdue 100% while for the imposition of TAP the fine is 200% of the original debt! Despite the operation of the platform for a few months and in the midst of a pandemic and quarantine, a huge part of the built-up areas, especially in the periphery, remains undeclared due to the fact that there was no information campaign based on the sending of emails by AADE to all property owners in the country and of Hellenism Abroad.
POMIDA requests the possibility of re-declaring undeclared real estate areas, with the imposition of a surcharge on the debts from 1.1.2020, of a percentage +20% for the first half of the delay, and +5% for each subsequent half, just as it applies to the settlement of the arbitrariness, and with a maximum limit of +50%.
- REOPERATION OF KEDE PLATFORM FOR MUNICIPAL PROPERTY FEES: Citizens are also complaining because due to the current lockdown for any new declaration citizens need months to make telephone appointments with the services revenues of the Municipalities. All of the above makes it imperative to immediately and permanently reopen the online application (platform), within the framework of course of the GOV.GR platform, as a permanent channel of communication and service for property owners in the country and the Hellenic Diaspora with the Municipalities where their assets are located , to which all other services that can be operated online should be added. On this issue, we should emphasize that while a superhuman effort is being made by the competent bodies of the Government so that citizens are served exclusively electronically by all government services, it is a setback and an unprecedented inconsistency, the interruption of the operation of the online application for the electronic declaration of undeclared surfaces and non-electrified areas, and the restoration of the declaration by physical presence at the cash services of OTAs.
B. THE INSTITUTIONS:
- LIMITATION TIME FOR CLAIMS TO OTA: Under the pressure of the “troika”, shortly before since the fall of the Samaras government, the most incredible thing has been legislated: While the State had begun to gradually reduce the statute of limitations for its tax claims to five years, with the recent decision of the Council of Ministers also for traffic taxes, for local authorities the five-year statute of limitations was legislated limitation of their claims in twenty years, when it comes to taxes, fees, rights and contributions to the OTAs that arise “due to the debtors not submitting the necessary data for their certification or submitting inaccurate or incomplete data or wrongly certified debts”, plus the fines on the debts of the last five years (as defined by the well-known provision – “carmaniola” of article 32 of Law 4304/2014!!!). This constitutes a legislative anomaly, which is completely against the philosophy and principles of the Rule of Law! The statute of limitations for citizens’ obligations, while it is five years for debts to the State, cannot be twenty years for debts to OTAs, i.e. four times the statute of limitations!
That is why the statute of limitations for the claims of OTAs, which will reach 20 years in 2030, must be legislatively returned to five years, as is currently the case for the tax claims of the State, so that citizens can respond to their payment . Otherwise, we will soon be led to inflated debts, mass confiscations and auctions of real estate by the local authorities, especially of the residents of the region and the Greek diaspora.
- ENFIA TRANSFER TO OTA WITHOUT ADDITIONAL TAX. The transfer of the annual real estate tax to the Local Government should be done in accordance with the conclusion of the Pissarides Committee, and the well-known IOBE Study, but also the government’s line for a gradual reduction of this burden, as an annual horizontal fee and without the ” additional tax” which is the bane of the real estate market, of construction, but above all of the “demolition” of the value of urban private real estate! It does not mean a “fee” which is imposed on an increasing scale or is charged multiple times in such a confiscatory manner.
The abolition of the additional tax will bring to State healthy tax revenues and employment and turnover in huge sectors of industry, craft, trade and liberal professions and will contribute to the restart of construction, but also of our entire economy! The approximately 500 million that the additional tax of ENFIA yields can easily be covered by the rational taxation of off-plan property, especially that which, due to its location and area, has or can be structured for residential and tourist development.
This important reform should in no case be canceled by increases in the objective values of the properties which will lead to an increase in the tax burden of the owners and will make it a free gift for the property owners of the country!
- AUTOMATED REMOVAL OF MULTI-YEAR URBAN PLANNING REAL ESTATE COMMITMENTS BY OTAs.It is known that many OTAs throughout the country have for decades committed many thousands of private properties for the creation of public spaces and facilities , without any real intention and possibility for their implementation, and without ever actually lifting these commitments within a reasonable period of time, even after the issuance of final court decisions, since – in most cases – the competent services of the OTAs . they do not proceed with the immediate removal of the planning commitment, but they review the issue, requiring the citizen to get involved in new bureaucratic procedures, which almost always result in the re-imposition of the planning commitment!
It is a fact that with articles 87-91 of Law 4759/2020 an attempt was made once again to reform the process of lifting urban planning commitments, but these provisions do not seem to solve the problem , since for the most part they reproduce the legislation currently in force. Thus, the self-righteous removal of urban planning commitments is not applied in practice, since the competent agencies refuse to take the necessary actions, with the result that the citizen is forced to resort to the competent Administrative Courts in order for them to diagnose the self-righteous removal, while subsequently the case it is again referred to the Administration for the completion of the relevant procedure, which ultimately is never processed, especially if the citizen is not able to bear the cost of drawing up the required plans and studies which, according to the law, should be carried out diligently and expense of the Administration.
This practice creates an obligation for the Municipalities to show in their budgets reserved amounts for alleged compensation payments, with the result of distorting their fiscal picture, and the citizens endless and costly legal entanglements with the OTAs, which, due to the successive abusive re-commitments, last even longer than the duration of a human life! These cases have also concerned the International Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg many times, which has issued numerous judgments against Greece (see from the particularly recent jurisprudence the case of Pialopoulos 1 and 2 v. Greece, as well as Vlastaris v. Greece in which the State is called upon to pay compensation of €620,000, if the lifting of the planning commitment is not implemented immediately!).
For these reasons we request the lifting of these commitments to be done automatically without the need for any diagnostic administrative procedure and for the released properties to be issued building permits with the applicable building conditions of the area and not special and punitively reduced conditions that devalue the property.
- NATIONAL LAND REGISTRY: INVESTIGATION IN THE OTA HOMES OF THE NOTIFIERS & OF UNKNOWN PROPERTY OWNER AND NOT IN THE GOVERNMENT: Article 9 of Law 2664/1998 on the National Land Registry provides that all undeclared properties of unknown owners, urban and rural, hundreds of thousands throughout the country, after the end of all deadlines for declaration and their legal claim, will fall to the Greek State!
This provision, the substance of which has never concerned anyone, is completely unenforceable and disastrous since the State can formally order the cadastral offices to transfer these properties to its name, but it lacks any practical ability to do anything about them, such as receive them, guard them against encroachments, maintain them , to dispose of them for any social or financial purpose, except for their inclusion in the Superfund!
That is why we propose that these properties be transferred to the relevant Municipalities, which they know and can make full use of urban real estate for the creation of “social housing” and other social uses and rural real estate for the rehabilitation of farmers’ property and any other use beneficial to the OTAs and society as a whole.
Especially for the “unknown owner” urban properties we should point out the following in particular: As is known, the institution of “social housing” in the form of houses owned by the local government or other agencies and are offered for rent on favorable terms to tenant families with low incomes, it is unfortunately an unknown concept in our country, in contrast to the whole of Europe. This is because there have never been OTA programs for the construction of houses for the above purpose, since they have never had the relevant financial capacity for such a project, and our State has always directed its efforts towards facilitating the acquisition of a private residence for its citizens in every way.
> to be allocated in an organized manner to cover the above needs. Thousands of apartments and houses as well as any other type of property of “unknown owner” will formally fall to the Greek State in accordance with article 9 of Law 2664/1998, which, however, has no direct and practical possibility to utilize them, as a result of which they will “be demolished » literally, at the expense of the flatmates, the neighbors, the whole society.
In this context, we believe that the conditions for changing the existing legislation regarding the management of properties that remain undeclared or “unidentified” are better than ever , so that these do not go to the Greek State, but to the local municipalities concerned. It goes without saying that the OTAs will have a much greater ability to take possession, guard, maintain and quickly dispose of these properties for the benefit of society and the economy, this will be an important reform that will be applauded by the entire Local Government and society in general!
The implementation of this important and inexpensive reform will give the opportunity to the large municipalities of our country to offer substantial help to our fellow citizens who are deprived of their own property residence, making use of the existing building infrastructures so that on the one hand they do not “collapse” degrading the residential environment in the apartment building and the neighborhood where they are located, and on the other hand they can be used constructively and for the benefit of the residents of the Municipalities of our country, creating essentially an inexpensive hybrid ” social housing” in the context of sustainable development!
For all the above issues, please schedule a meeting with the Presidency of our Federation as soon as possible.
At your disposal for any clarification and cooperation
The President The Secretary General “text-align: justify?”> Stratos I. Paradias Tasos G. Vappas
