Greece

[GR] Licensing of national DTT providers completed

IRIS 2018-9:1/21

Alexandros Economou

National Council for Radio and Television

The National Council for Radio and Television (NCRT) is expected to complete the tender for licensing seven companies providing national free-to-air DTT content by the end of October 2018. Ultimately, five of the six companies that participated on 11 January 2018 met the legal requirements. According to the NCRT’s decision of 27 June 2018, one company should not be accepted for the principal reason that its sole ultimate shareholder had failed to fully establish its actual connection with the financial means used for the formation of the capital of the candidate company. It was underlined that this gave rise to uncertainty about the transparency of the ownership regime of this company, contrary to the relevant constitutional requirements.

As the number of participants in the procedure was less than the number of licences to be granted, no auction was conducted and, according to a new decision by NCRT dating from 5 September 2018, the licences will be issued against payment of the price stipulated in the Ministerial Decision: the entry price was fixed at EUR 3 500 000 (see IRIS 2017-9/21). All 5 licensees must pay the amount of EUR 3 500 000 before 20 September 2018; this represents the first of 10 installments of the ten-year licence.

After this tender, the NCRT has to organise tenders for licensing national free-to-air DTT providers with no informative content and regional providers.


References

  • Απόφαση ΕΣΡ 65/2018 σχετικά με την απόρριψη της αίτησης της εταιρείας ΤΗΛΕΟΠΤΙΚΗ ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΑΝΩΝΥΜΗ ΕΤΑΙΡΕΙΑ
  • https://www.esr.gr/wp-content/uploads/esr_apofasi_65-2018.pdf
  • Rejection of the application of Tileoptiki Elliniki SA 65/2018, 27 June 2018


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This article has been published in IRIS Legal Observations of the European Audiovisual Observatory.