The president of Athens Attiko Metro Yannis Mylopoulos claims that the first metro line in Thessaloniki will be operational by 2020 and that the whole project will be finished by 2026. He was confident that these deadlines can be met, provided that the main lines are included in the “Juncker” investment package. This, he explained, is necessary in order to ensure that the necessary funding to complete the project will be secured. Mylopoulos warned that the Thessaloniki project was temporarily halted due to the need to solve “problems of the past” and thanked the District governor of Central Macedonia Apostolos Tzitzikostas for his support.
The Juncker Plan, in fact, is key to another 42 projects in Greece that carry an estimated value of €5.6bn, according to George Stathakis, Economy Minister of Greece. These projects will be announced soon and submitted for approval. These projects are the ones that were chosen from an initial landslide of 2,000 funding proposals for projects in Greece (worth a total of €174bn).
According to the current pre-approved list, 20 of the projects will concern the country’s energy sector, five concern infrastructure and logistics, with the rest made up of tourism, IT and telecoms and research and development initiatives.
