economy

A few weeks before the national and municipal elections, but also on the eve of the announcement of the "electronic property transfer file", the relevant ministry and the mayors chose to surprise the property owners by juggling the regulation that had been put in place during the debate in the Parliament in consultation and submitted for voting with another completely opposite regulation, with which they established the essentially inalienable nature of such debts, trampling on every concept of rational and good administration, and imposing confiscatory retroactive charges on unsuspecting citizens.

The initial wording for which POMIDA expressed its satisfaction, provided for the abolition of the 20-year limitation period that applied from 2014 until now and the gradual reinstatement within two years of the five-year limitation period for all kinds of obligations of citizens to the Municipalities, he points out. The Ministry of the Interior even blatantly argued in favor of the 5-year statute of limitations in the accompanying texts of the bill, pointing out that with the previous regime "we can observe the burden and the surprise of citizens who are called even 23 years later to pay amounts for a fine that they may have paid without have kept after so long the proof, burdening the courts with many unprovable and limited appeals, conflicts and constant tension between municipal authorities, collective bodies and supervisory authorities and ultimately legal uncertainty".

The 5-year statute of limitations for debts is in line with the corresponding regulations recently adopted by the Ministry of Finance for taxes and the Ministry of Labor for insurance contributions following a relevant decision of the Council of State. But the Ministry of the Interior and the Municipalities seem to constitute another state, deciding and legislating not only not to reduce the debt limitation period, as they should, but also to extend it backwards, until the middle of the 20th century as they were exempted from five-year statute of limitations on debts from any undeclared or incomplete property surface, with the unprecedented in legal times formulation that they will be ascertained against the owners "from the origin of their obligation"!!! That is, up to and including 1958 for municipal fees and from 1993 for TAP!

POMIDA addressed a relevant letter of protest to the Minister of the Interior Mr. Makis Voridis, the Deputy Minister of the Interior Mr. Stelios Petsa, the General Secretary of the Interior Mr. Michalis Stavrianoudakis, the President of KEDE Mr. Dimitris Papastergiou and the Mayor of Athens Mr. Costas Bakoyannis, requesting the immediate withdrawal of the unprecedented legal brutality of this regulation, i.e. the imposition of retroactive municipal fees going back to ... the previous century!

The letter states, among other things, that "With this provision, any unsuspecting citizen who, from the detailed measurement carried out today by an engineer for building identity due to a contract of parental provision or property transfer, finds for the first time that some square meters of the area of his property are not had been declared to the relevant municipality, will be charged with astronomical retroactive amounts of several decades, which, especially in commercial properties where municipal fees are as a rule five times the residential ones, will even exceed the value of the property itself, with the final result of "confiscation" of, because they will be impossible to pay. While the public and insurance funds, as well as the jurisprudence as a whole, adopt the five-year term, the mayors, with the blessings of the Government, will literally "scrape" the citizens with irrevocable retroactive fees even up to 30-65 years!!!"