Athens News Agency: News in English, 11-05-17

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From: The Athens News Agency at <http://www.ana.gr/>

CONTENTS

[01] Cabinet meeting on action in Athens

[02] Plan for major overhaul of state sector

[03] Wind power leads RES growth 

[01] Cabinet meeting on action in Athens

The measures decided include daily patrols that will also be assisted by members of the municipal police, targeted action by the Crime Prevention and Suppression Group, large operations of generalised police checks at least on a weekly basis, the creation of a bicycle road network and the turning of old hotels in central Athens into student dormitories.ana-mpa

Addressing the cabinet meeting, Premier Papandreou said, according to reports, that Athens is the place where the meaning of a democratic city was born but today the citizen lives isolated from the city.

The meeting focused on the existing problems in the centre of Athens and was also attended by Athens Mayor George Kaminis and Attica Regional Governor Yiannis Sgouros.

The prime minister said the condemnation of violence is not enough, stressing that a new enactment of democracy is required in the country that will secure institutions which will cultivate the citizens' participation.

"Our intervention does not aim simply at the centre's self-evident security but at the city finding its soul once again," Papandreou added.

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[02] Plan for major overhaul of state sector

He stressed that human resources - the civil servants themselves - will be the main focus in this drive for a reformed state, which would be free of pockets of corruption and mismanagement.

Ragoussis said that the effort would require great political will and a willingness to ignore political cost, given the attitudes that dominate within the two main parties and high-ranking trade unionists concerning the civil service and broader public sector.

One of the pillars on which the new, reformed public administration will be based was the decision announced by the prime minister a few days earlier to convert the status of civil servants to that of 'employees of state', breaking down the barriers between each ministry and introducing evaluation mechanism for ministry staff.

Ragoussis noted that the more important change this introduced was not the power to fire employees but a process of evaluation that would reveal who was unfit to be in the civil service'. He expressed the opinion that the simple knowledge that they would be evaluated would prompt employees to "do their best" so that the majority would not fail such an evaluation.

"One of the major problems of the Greek state is that there is no such evaluation system for many years now, therefore no one ensures or has any incentive to perform better".

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[03] Wind power leads RES growth

ICAP said the sector was growing in an unbalancing way, with market focusing mainly to the technologically mature and economically more competitive wind power energy sector. Wind power parks accounted for 78 pct of total capacity, followed by small hydro-electric power units (12 pct), photovoltaic parks (7.4 pct) and bio gas and maze units (2.4 pct). Wind power energy should account for 72 pct of all Renewable Energy Sources' capacity by 2020.

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