l

21-07-16 Ministry hopes to persuade Munich to allow completion of Greek school

On July 20 the mayor of the Bavarian capital of Munich decided that the municipality will keep a lot of land that had been ceded to Greece at a low price in 1991, in order to build a Greek school.

This is a painful development for our country.

The main reason cited by the municipality of Munich for taking this negative decision for Athens was the loss of Greece’s credibility, according to all Munich officials involved in the school building case. For about 15 years, the project remained inert, despite the assurances of consecutive Greek governments during this period that they would assume their responsibilities.

Only in September, 2015, under the current political leadership of the Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, was there the substantial progress in building the school, which  was already under construction.  But this was not enough to remove the sense of Greece’s unreliability in the eyes of Bavarian officials.

The Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs made every possible effort regain credibility. To that end, Deputy Minister Pelegrinis visited Munich twice.

On March 10, 2016, accompanied by the Greek Consul General in Munich Panagiota Konstantinopoulou,  Pelegrinis visited with Bavarian State Minister for Education, Science and the Arts, Ludwig Spaenle.

During the second visit on June 10, Minister Pelegrinis, accompanied by the president of Buildings Infrastructure S.A. Ioanna Kontouli and Greece’s Consul General in Munich, met with the competent Deputy-Mayor Josef Schmid, Head of the Department of Labor and Economic Development      

Confirming our unswerving will to assume our responsibilities regarding construction of the school, we opened a bank account in the Municipal Bank of Munich in order to reassure the municipality of our steady and unimpeded funding of the project. Secondly, we submitted a detailed plan for the progress of the construction work.

Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, it proved impossible to persuade the Municipality of Munich to reverse its decision to reclaim the property.

We await an official briefing from the Municipality of Munich in order to determine our future course.

We reaffirm that the Ministry of Education, Research and Religious Affairs, and the competent organisation for completion of the construction project, Buildings Infrastructure S.A., which is under the Ministry of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks, will exhaust every possibility to enable continuation of the project, as the Greeks of Munich, and of Germany more generally, demand.