The future is the past

Equally, is it a wise strategy to shut the door on a process which has been proven by experience worldwide to have considerable benefits?

Practically speaking, this is what Greece’s new leftist government, headed by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, has done in conjunction with the country’s port privatisation programme. On taking power, in January of this year, the new government launched a programme that sought to cancel key terms of Greece’s financial bail-out programme including what it calls the “crime” of selling off strategic national assets.

“We are not discussing any further sale or privatisation of Piraeus Port or Thessaloniki Port,” government spokesman Gabriel Sakellaridis told Greek television.

A door was basically slammed shut, leaving potential buyers with no alternative other than to walk away with no hope of recouping the substantial costs involved in participating in the port privatisation process.

Perhaps more to the point, it leaves Greece with little or no prospect of realising the higher investment and efficiency levels that nearby countries such as Turkey and Egypt have achieved as result of privatisation in their respective port industries. The future is in effect the past, and with a government clampdown on new investment in the major Greek ports that future looks fairly bleak.

There are, however, bright spots: in Piraeus, COSCO is building one of the Mediterranean’s biggest transhipment hubs and there is the ability of the port of Thessaloniki to achieve double digit growth in the container sector in 2014. On the other hand, it is clear that without larger involvement of the private sector in Greece’s port industry it will continue to feature substantial untapped potential, a good portion of which may erode as ‘the moment is lost’.

At the outset of the Greek port privatisation process, there was considerable doubt in certain circles that it would be brought to a fruitful conclusion. And so it has proved. It is a contemporary ‘Greek tragedy’.