Public economics

Thrivest, the holdings company owned by Dimitris Bakos, Giannis Kaimenakis and Alexandros Exarchou, for Intrakat, now renamed Aktor, is planning acquisitions and investment of 2 billion euros, and development in fields such as RES, real estate and PPP, the group's managing director, Alexandros Exarchou, tells Kathimerini.

Something is moving, after months, even years, of delays in infrastructure programs implemented through public-private partnerships (PPPs).

Competitive tenders for projects budgeted at over €5 billion are either at the stage of submission of binding offers by the competing firms or consortiums, or at the stage of preliminary negotiations with the bidders.

Deputy Transport and Infrastructure Minister Nikos Tachiaos stressed the need to redefine the framework of public-private partnerships (PPP), given the ambitious fiscal goals that the country must achieve, in an interview to the Athens-Macedonian News Agency on Saturday.

More than three out of every seven public contracts are awarded following procedures in which there was only one tender, and even when there is more than one tender the average per procedure is only 2.6 participants.

Women employed in the European Union are still earning 13 percent on average less than their male counterparts, the European Commission has said.

"This means that for every euro a man earns, a women will make only 87 cents," the commission said in a statement.

Looked at another way, women have to work more days in a year to attain the same annual salary level as a man.

The government does not mull adding new assets to the privatization portfolio, Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek has said.

The government has prolonged the community benefit programs (TYP) across 11 provinces within the earthquake-stricken regions, ensuring continued support for the unemployed registered with the country's employment agency İşkur.

She added that the opposition is against this law only because it was brought by Aleksandar Vui and the Serbian Progressive Party.

"Foreign investments have decreased by 50% over the past year, and this is a good litmus test," Kalin Slavov, executive director of Transparency International, told BNR before the presentation of the International Corruption Perceptions Index for 2021.

The share of global wealth of the world's richest people soared at a record pace during the Covid pandemic, a report on inequality showed on Dec. 7.    

Since 1995, the slice held by billionaires has risen from one percent to three percent, according to the World Inequality Report.