Extra €500 million in energy aid coming, PM says

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis pledged another half a billion euros in support subsidies to tackle the ongoing energy crisis. 

Speaking on Thursday at a cabinet meeting, he said that apart from the subsidies in August to the bills of households and businesses, another half a billion euros will be available “from the windfall revenues of electricity producers that are now being transferred to the Energy Transition Fund.”

This amount will in turn be returned to society for its support, he said.

The government, he stressed, is continuing to build fortifications against electricity price increases.

“We are essentially exhausting our fiscal margins, which are obviously increased and improved due to the good performance of the national economy,” he said, noting that natural gas is 10 times more expensive than it was before this energy crisis started.

“In August, however, the bills of households and businesses will be subsidized in total from all the resources we have at our disposal, with an amount that exceeds 1 billion – this only for one month. And in this way up to 90% of the increases for households can be absorbed across the board for everyone,” he said.

Referring to the latest decisions in Brussels, he said they “may not be as bold as the circumstances require,” but noted the exemptions achieved by Greece regarding the requirements of European Union member-states to reduce gas consumption by 15%.

Responding to the opposition’s criticism over the recent fires that have ravaged the country, he said that this year “we have more firefighters, more aerial means, specialized corps from abroad and specialized firefighters who are now entering and attacking the fires in the forests.”

He also took a swipe at critics of his government’s response, calling them armchair firefighters “who criticize from a distance,” on the assumption “that fires supposedly extinguish themselves, in some magical way.”