“We run at the speed of… a boulevard on an open, straight and well-paved road, without ups and downs, detours and dead ends,” was Takis Malacate’s main position when asked how things were going lately. months due to an ambitious plan for a dual botanical renovation and an avenue focusing on the construction of a new football stadium for Panathinaikos. For a country like Greece, where nothing should be taken for granted, the phrase “we are moving on autopilot” may seem like an exaggeration, but according to the president of Amateur Panathinaikos, this is the reality for the moment: “The water entered forever in the groove. Everything works like clockwork, we are moving within the time frame that we initially determined, without expecting unpleasant surprises. At this pace, it is expected that everything will work on schedule and everything will be ready on time.”

It comes as no pleasant surprise to Mr. Malacate that such an extraordinarily vague advancement of such a large, special and demanding project in a country accustomed to suffering from many anchorages and obstacles, mainly caused by lack of organization and gangrene of bureaucracy. “The road did not open by itself. Very careful steps were taken from all sides, all details were carefully adjusted from the very beginning, all scenarios that could create obstacles to the progress of the project from a legal, city or financial point of view were envisaged and successfully eliminated. We were late because we were in a hurry! Nothing was done by accident or randomly, out of our desire to move quickly in order to unravel. All steps in every step of the process have been done very carefully so far and we will continue to do so. Time is our ally, not our enemy, everything is going smoothly, and the project will be ready within the deadlines set not arbitrarily, but on the basis of foreseen conditions.”

A big “splinter” in such ambitious projects with a long implementation period is the very common overspending of the financial budget, mainly due to the rise in construction costs along the way, with the revaluation of materials, inflation, and labor potential. etc. and so on. A budget adjustment has already been made, on time and without significant delay, which has adjusted the prices of current data under pressure caused by international conditions such as the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. All parties involved seem confident that there will be no unpleasant surprises and that everything will remain under control to the end, precisely because careful assessments and planning have been made that cover even more extreme scenarios.

The tender for the project has been completed, the contractor has been selected (this is a consortium of companies AKTOR, TERNA and MYTILINEOS) and all procedures have been completed, the next step is the approval of the contracts by the Audit Commission, their signing, re-issuance – the issuance of permits and the start of the main work in the fall, and from the summer – several preliminary projects . According to the schedule, the facilities of the amateur Panathinaikos will be completed in about two years, by the summer of 2025, and the main project, a football stadium with a capacity of 40,000 spectators, is expected to be completed in a year, before the start of the 2026-27 competitive period. This is a tight schedule, any deviations, if they occur naturally, are negligible.

It is expected that the accompanying projects will also develop very rapidly, which will radically change the image of the region as a whole at the level of infrastructure. Botanikos Elaionas is an area on the side of the historic Holy Way, very close to the center of Athens, under the Acropolis. The Dual Reconstruction Plan aims to modernize and radically transform the entire area with many infrastructure projects totaling more than 100 million euros, most of which will be raised from the Recovery Fund, as officially envisaged by the decision of the Ministry of Finance. The customer is the municipality of Athens, which all this time “leads” almost all procedures.

The projects that have been included in the Recovery Fund accompany the construction of the stadium and are key to the development of the wider area as they begin in 2023 and have an estimated time of final completion in the fourth quarter of 2025. Briefly, these are road construction – bicycle path projects, construction of a rain and drainage network, formation of the channel of the Prophet Daniel stream located in the area of ​​​​Double redevelopment, exclusion for the opening of roads, landscaping and beautification of the area in the area of ​​Elion, reconstruction of the Naval Fort, projects for safe access and departure of thousands of fans on match days. Accordingly, the main work on the other pillar of the Dual Reconstruction Plan, in the area of ​​Leoforos, will only start (as stipulated in the contract) when the football stadium in Votanikos is completed and handed over to Panathinaikos.