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On 9 October 2007, the National Council for Radio and Television (ESR) decided to discontinue the issuing of certificates establishing the incompatibility between the ownership of media enterprises and the conclusion of contracts with public entities. In fact, the competence of ESR is limited to issuing a certificate on the existence of such an incompatibility based upon the exclusive condition that a final condemnatory Court decision related to the offence of active corruption has been notified to the Council by the interested enterprise or by the Authority responsible for the tender. In taking...

The necessity of a new tender, which will actually result in the issuing of radio and television licenses is proving even more imperative, after a decision delivered by the State Council (StE) on 2 October 2007. This decision found that two legal provisions were unconstitutional, provisions that permitted all regional television stations that had participated in the tender of the year 1998 to function even beyond a “reasonable” period of time after this tender was published, which resulted in de facto broadcasting activities without a clear official framework within which to operate in certain...

In 1999 Nikitas Lionarakis, the presenter and coordinator of a radio programme broadcast live by the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation ERT, invited the journalist E.V. to debate various aspects of Greek foreign policy. During the broadcast, E.V. raised the subject of “the Öcalan case”. He referred to the fact that Öcalan, the ex-leader of the PKK who was prosecuted by the Turkish authorities for terrorism, had been helped by certain persons in Greece to illegally enter the country and to escape to Kenya. E.V. referred to F.K., a lawyer who had stood as a candidate in past...

Thanks to the votes of the current governing party, the Bill on the Concentration and Licensing of Media Undertakings (see IRIS 2007-5: 11) was recently passed into law by the Greek parliament. The final text differs only slightly from the one which was the object of informal discussions within the circle of interested parties last March. The final text puts an emphasis on the licensing procedure for analogue television (12 articles), since in Greece only a certain number of television and radio stations hold such a license. The granting of licenses is based on a tender initiated by the Ethniko...

The European Commission has decided to refer Greece to the European Court of Justice. The Commission believes the Greek Ministerial Decision No 24014/2005 on the evidence required for the application of Law No 3310/2005 as amended by Law 3414/2005 - on tenderers "interconnected" with mass media businesses- introduces grounds for exclusion from public procurement in Greece. Such exclusion is deemed incompatible with Community Law. That Act provides that unless both participants and other so-called "inter-connected" persons operating in the media market submit a number of "extracts from the judicial...