Galery

1

Imagine a company with an absolute monopoly, which reduces the wages of its employees by 30 percent, increases the prices of its services by 40 percent and the only thing it achieves is to get even closer to bankruptcy! This is the image of "Public Transport" JSC—in other words the assignee of the Athens metro, which absorbed the trams and the train after the implementation of the public transport law.

Law 3920, which is based on a groundless, as it turned out later, business plan had the ambition to achieve lower deficit and losses of the public transport as well as an increase in revenues.

And despite all neither one nor the other happened. On the contrary, the quality of services for citizens worsens, the management has "frozen" almost all contracts, there are no existing rules and schedules, and the provisions of the law are not being applied.

Vima newspaper previously presented a full report on the economic parameters of the "Public Transport" JSC, which are made worse. They should mobilize the leadership of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Finance before it is too late and before the failure of perhaps the most significant public investment in the history of modern Athens, i.e. the most modern metro in Europe, which gives a contemporary look to the Greek capital.

Senior officials stress that the example of "Public Transport" JSC should serve as a lesson and a warning to "apprentice-sorcerers," who included a further increase in public transport fares in the updated Memorandum.

The increase did not make a difference

According to the report, it is estimated that in comparison to the business plan approved by the Interdepartmental Commission, the year 2011 will end with a huge variation in revenue before the subsidy, which will exceed 40 million euros. And that is because instead of 195 million euros total operating income from "Public Transport", JSC itself believes that they will receive 154 million euros. This way the deficit before the state subsidy will reach 15.5 million euros, and after the subsidy, which is not in the business plan, the company will have a surplus of 8 million euros. But these are all theoretical parameters, while the reality is even crueller.

Although ticket prices were increased by 40 percent, their revenues increased only by 5 percent, i.e. 98 million euros increased to 103 million euros, a result that shows the complete failure of the measure.

So together with the decline in revenue from other sources within the range of 10 percent (10.4 million euros versus 9.3 million euros), the turnover of the company "Public Transport" JSC increased only 3.5 percent—in other words from 109 million euros to 112 million euros.

As a result of all this, and keeping in mind the subsidy reduction with 27 percent (from 28 million euros to 20 million euros), the total operating revenue of the company was reduced by 2.8 percent, dropping from 137 million euros to 133 million euros!

And the most disturbing fact is that despite the cuts in salaries and expenses, the summary data for 2010-2011 shows a deficit of around 19 million euros and a marginal surplus (after subsidy) of only 1.8 million euros.

According to the company "Public Transport" JSC, a substantial decline is observed in terms of fines issued and examples from July, August and September are significant, since the reduction is of about 84 percent, 25 percent and 23 percent respectively, compared to 2010.

Also, the objective of reducing overtime has not been achieved, since employees of the metro, tram and train are working overtime just like in 2010.

"I do not pay, I do not pay" in the metro

The metro reported an increase in ticket sales in the range of only 7.6 percent (from 60 to 64 million euros) and operating income of 5.9 percent (from 67 to 71 million euros). The result before the subsidy is 9.2 million euros, which with state subsidies reach 20 million euros.

Significantly, in September 2010 ticket sales (the price of which was 1 euro) brought to the company 10.2 million euros, while the following year the amount decreased by almost 50 percent, reaching only 5.2 million euros!

Senior sources in the public transport company explain the phenomenon with the widespread and uncontrollable free-rides, which passengers using the metro witness daily.

Decline also for the train

The comparison between 2010 and 2011 for the Athens train is frustrating, considering that ticket prices were increased by 40 percent, while sales remained the same as last year, i.e. 34 million euros.

Naturally, given the decline in other revenues as well and in the subsidy, the company's revenue fell from 60 to 43 million euros, i.e. by 27.4 percent. Although expenses also decreased by 34.7 percent, reaching 52 million euros (from 81 million euros), the end result remains a significant deficit of 9 million euros.

The situation with trams is the same

Despite the increase in ticket prices by 40 percent, the trams as well were not able to increase their income, because the sale of tickets has increased barely from 4 million euros to 4.4 million euros, an increase which, coupled with the reduction of other income and state subsidies, led to the reduction of total revenue by 1.9 percent, i.e. from 7.3 million euros to 7.1 million euros.

With costs reduced by 13.8 percent, reaching 16.6 million euros from 19.2 million euros, trams account for a deficit of 11 million euros (before subsidy) and 9 million after the state subsidy.

Significantly, when comparing September 2010 to September 2011, the company "Public Transport" JSC reported a decrease in ticket sales by 53 percent, which have decreased from 0.8 million euros to 0.4 million euros.