Lamda Development execs: Construction at Helleniko to begin in Feb.; large portion completed by 2025

Athens-based Lamda Development on Tuesday unveiled its latest, and updated master plan for its pre-eminent project, the massive Helleniko property – The Ellinikon – in coastal southeast Athens, promising that construction will finally begin in February 2022.

The project, an iconic privatization in Greece and one of the biggest real estate developments in Europe, features an investment of up to eight billion euros.

Failure to exploit the 600-hectare site were the old Athens airport once operated and where several venues for the 2004 Olympic Games were hosted, was a “sore point” for successive Greek governments, until three bailout memorandums over the past decade landed the privatization in a “laundry list” that creditors demanded the Greek state achieve.

ATHEX-listed Lamda has unveiled detailed plans for shopping malls, up to six high-rise towers facing the Saronic Gulf, hotels, an integrated casino resort concession and high-end residences within a planned community under a 99-year lease deal first unveiled in 2014.

“Elliniko has begun and will be completed, to a large degree, by 2025, so all citizens can enjoy it and feel proud,” Lamda Development CEO Odysseas Athanasiou said on Tuesday, during a live-streamed presentation.

Lamda executives reiterated that plans to create the biggest park in Greece around the new buildings at the site remains, with the Helleniko project to include the latest in “smart” and environmentally friendly innovations and designs