With seafront towers and tax breaks, Athens may be the new Dubai - The Times
On a giant building site on the southern outskirts of Athens, the 50-floor Riviera Tower rises 200 metres from what was, for six decades until 2001, the city’s airport.
The tower, which would not look out of place in Dubai, is part of the seafront Ellinikon project that, when its final phase is completed almost a decade from now, will comprise 9,000 homes, as well as hotels, offices, shops, doctors’ surgeries, schools and a marina. The first residents are due to move in next summer.
“This adds yet another piece to the largest urban regeneration project being carried out in Europe, marking the triumph of tomorrow over yesterday,” Kyriakos Mitsotakis, 58, the prime minister, said last week at the opening of a sports park on the site. “It is becoming a reality after many years of constraints and inertia.”
Ellinikon, on the Athens Riviera, is a symbol of Greece’s remarkable ten-year transition from the sick man of Europe to one of the EU’s fastest-growing economies. Its orderly public finances, with a healthy budget surplus and falling debt, put Britain to shame.
Thanks to a slew of targeted tax breaks, the country is wooing hedge funders and other high-rollers from the financial world in an attempt to imitate the success of Milan or even Dubai.
Reports this month that Chris Rokos, 55, a billionaire hedge fund manager believed to be the UK’s third-largest taxpayer, was relocating to Greece, have been seized on by critics of the British government as further proof that the expectation of more pain in next month’s budget is accelerating an exodus of the rich.
By contrast, for Mitsotakis, and his centre-right New Democracy administration, it was a vindication of policies implemented since he first came to power in 2019, intended to make his country an attractive destination for foreign businesses — and for those that run them.
Rokos, who has a net worth of about $4 billion (£2.96 billion), according to Bloomberg’s billionaires index, and is estimated to have paid £330 million in British tax last year, is thought to be planning to open a branch of his firm, Rokos Capital Management (RCM), in Athens.
The revelation of his move followed news that Millennium Management, a New York-based hedge fund that manages more than $90 billion in global assets, is also preparing to establish a presence in the Greek capital.
Kyriakos Pierrakakis, the Greek finance minister, is visiting London this month, promoting speculation he may be trying to persuade other high-net-worth individuals, especially in the hedge fund sector, to follow suit.
“What we are creating is a stable and competitive framework that attracts international businesses and high-level executives,” Pierrakakis said in a recent interview with the newspaper Kathimerini. “This is particularly relevant for young Greeks. We want it to be possible to build an international career in finance from Athens — for international capital and Greek talent to meet here.”
He added: “Chris Rokos sends the same message by choosing Greece for both his tax residence and his company’s operations.”
Rokos, who announced this March that he was donating £190 million to Cambridge University to “give something back to Britain”, is reportedly moving to Greece because he is “terrified” about the “risk of an exit tax being introduced” in the UK. A spokesman declined to comment.
But under new rules this year, investment professionals who relocate to Greece can pay just 5 per cent on “carried interest” — a share of profits taken as a reward for performance – a fraction of the rate in the UK. To do so, they must satisfy certain conditions, chief among them that the relevant Greek entity spends at least €3 million a year in the country.
Greece has also followed the example of Italy, which in 2017, allowed people relocating there to pay a flat tax of €100,000 on all foreign-sourced income, helping transform Milan into a mecca for wealthy foreigners and providing a boost to its financial sector. While Italy has since raised this figure to €300,000, Greece has left it unchanged.
Since 2020, foreign retirees who transfer their tax residence to Greece can benefit from a 7 per cent flat tax on all foreign-source income for up to 15 years. There is also a “golden visa” programme for non-EU citizens that gives a residence permit to those who invest at least £250,000 to £800,000 in a property, depending on its nature and location.
The idea of international financiers shifting their residence to Greece would have seemed absurd a decade ago, when the country was on the verge of economic collapse and Yanis Varoufakis, the British-educated finance minister, was railing against his European counterparts.
Varoufakis resigned in July 2015 after less than six months in protest against what he saw as a surrender by Alexis Tsipras, the leader of the left-wing Syriza party, to the austerity policies demanded by the EU. Tsipras pressed on regardless with the reforms, and by 2017 the economy was expanding again.
Growth has continued apace since — apart from a blip during Covid — under Mitsotakis, who was returned to power in June 2023 and looks likely to win the parliamentary election next spring.
Real Greek GDP growth this year is expected to be 2.0 per cent — about double that for the UK — according to the Ministry of Economy and Finance, while the government is running a surplus of 0.2 per cent of GDP, compared with a UK deficit expected to hit 3.8 per cent by the end of the year.
Nikos Theocharakis, a close associate of Varoufakis, whose Mera25 party now polls only about 3 per cent, is sceptical when I asked him about Greece’s economic miracle. “Greeks now spend about 40 per cent of disposal income on housing,” he said, reeling off a long list of the country’s continued economic woes.
Nor is he keen to see the arrival of foreign players from the financial sector. “These people are actually bleeding the economy. They are rent-seekers, who are not producing anything.”
Yet Athens certainly feels a much happier place than a decade ago, according to Ian Lesser, an expert on Greece at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, who has been visiting since the 1980s. “The collapse had a very visible effect on the fabric of the city,” he said. “Empty stores, things not being maintained, graffiti everywhere. The centre of Athens was a very much rougher looking and feeling place.
“Growth was rather slow until recently, and then it picked up a lot speed. Certain sectors in the economy are doing very, very well, and the government is trying to make sure it is durable.”
As well as looking to Europe, Greece is looking to the southeast. “There is talk about a new Byzantium,” Lesser added. “A lot of this new vitality is connected to places where Greece historically had very close ties.”
This is backed by Henley & Partners, which does residence and citizenship planning for the wealthy. It says interest in moving to Greece has surged, making the country the second-most popular destination after St Kitts & Nevis. A large part of the rise has been driven by Turkish citizens, who account for almost a third of applications for “golden visas”
“Greece is increasingly competing for the attention of the same internationally mobile families considering places such as Milan and Dubai,” said Mario Rafael, a managing director at the firm.
Some of the new arrivals may settle at the Ellinikon. “50 per cent of the buyers are locals, 20 per cent Greek diaspora and 30 per cent international,” said Andreas Kambanellas, commercial director of residential.
Typical British buyers, often with children, work in finance or want somewhere they can work remotely. “There are people moving out for tax reasons,” he said. “They start looking at Spain, Portugal or Italy, and then Greece, and the first thing that comes up is the Ellinikon.”
