"The largest Greek port city of Piraeus receives investment from China under a 35-year concession agreement, but there is no strategic threat to Greek investments," Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said in a speech to the Council on International Relations in Washington, according to event organizers.
Two-thirds of the port of Piraeus, the seventh largest in the world, is owned by the Chinese - isn't there a conflict of interest? "I get asked this question quite often when I visit the US. It should be noted that the investments are, of course, aimed at the port of Piraeus, but they came at the height of the financial crisis, when no one was interested in investing in Greece, Mitsotakis recalled.
„There is an agreement on the management of the port of Piraeus, but it is not the only port in Greece that receives investment from abroad,” continued Mitsotakis. "We are currently privatizing many other ports, for example the ports of Igoumenitsa (northwest Greece) and Heraklion (on the island of Crete). These two ports were actually acquired by a large Italian consortium. And if you look at the amount of foreign investment in Greece, there have been almost no Chinese in the last five years. So Greece was able to attract significant foreign direct investment, but not from China. Therefore, I don't think that the Greek economy is too dependent on Chinese investment in any form, after all the port of Piraeus is regulated by the Greek authorities. And I don't feel any strategic threat from the Chinese presence," the prime minister added.
In 2008, the Chinese company China Ocean Shipping took most of Piraeus on a 35-year concession with a lease payment of around 100 million euros per year. In 2016, this company acquired a 67% stake in the port.