The Vassiliko gas terminal fiasco is not over by any stretch of the imagination. It is set to play and play as deputies were informed on Tuesday. A representative of the project manager that took over the LNG venture in May disappointed everyone at the House energy committee meeting when he informed them that he had no idea when the project would be completed.

The company had only taken over as project manager in May and would submit a timetable for the remaining work in March 2026. Before then, it will not be in a position to give a date for the completion of all the necessary work for the operation of the LNG terminal. Although the news was very disappointing, raising fears that the project would not be ready before 2027, the project manager did not raise expectations as has been the practice until now.

In fact, part of the disappointment stems from the fact that the Energy Minister Giorgos Papanastasiou had been making ludicrously optimistic predictions about the completion of the project. There had been talk that it could be finished by the end of this year, but it was never going to happen, even if 50 per cent of the work had been completed and a legal loophole had been found for cooperating with the sub-contractor of the Chinese consortium. Discussions were in progress with the sub-contractor according to Defa, the natural gas public company that oversees the project.

That Defa is still involved cannot inspire much confidence as this was the public company that went along with Nicos Anastasiades’ scandalous decision to award the project to a company that had zero experience in creating and operating LNG terminals without competitive tenders. Defa’s board and chairman were complicit in this scam, never having expressed the slightest reservation about the then president’s decision-making, which went against the most basic rules of sound government.   

Papanastasiou, aware that government would be coming under attack for the latest delays, decided to have a few digs at the previous government, something he had refrained from doing so far. The project had been taken over “with a great deal of baggage and problematic decisions”, he said, adding that this government would never have taken the decisions made in 2019. “The choice of contractor and the extremely vague contracts would not be repeated,” by this government.

Was the Anastasiades’ government’s decisions a case of incompetence or were there other suspicious factors at play? Why has there been no investigation into this fiasco which will end up costing the taxpayer a few hundred million euros not to mention the prospect of the project not being completed until 2027 – some eight years after the initial contract was signed? Apart from the bad government choices, what was the role played by Defa and its subsidiary, Etyfa (the natural gas infrastructure company) that was in charge of the project? 

Such costly, large-scale incompetence, reckless irresponsibility and amateurishness should not go unpunished. It most probably will, but the least the taxpayer should expect is for all the culprits of this fiasco to be exposed.