- The BOAK (or VOAK, depending on who you ask and your Greek mastery) highway project faces new delays and rising costs.
- Heraklion’s Chamber of Commerce sent an urgent letter to two ministries.
- Concerns include court disputes, stalled expropriations, and huge compensation payments.
- There is a real risk of missed deadlines and lost funding.
- The Chamber proposes three solutions to keep Crete’s most important project moving.
Crete’s “forever project” gets another warning shot
Crete has been waiting decades for the BOAK — the modern highway meant to replace the dangerous old north-coast road. Today, the Heraklion Chamber of Commerce decided enough is enough. Its president, Vangelis Karkanakis, sent a formal letter to the Ministries of Infrastructure and Finance, urging them to keep the project on track without further delays or additional costs to the Greek taxpayer.
The tone of the letter is polite.
The message is not.
According to the Chamber, BOAK has become trapped in a “multi-layered system of dysfunctions” — a diplomatic way of saying that bureaucracy, court cases, and stalled procedures have slowed the project to a crawl.
The expensive consequences no one wants to talk about
The Chamber highlights a problem that has now become public:
Compensation payments are exploding.
In several cases, the state has had to pay contractors millions not for construction work, but for delays caused by administrative issues. The most discussed example is the Neapoli–Agios Nikolaos section, where the contractor received €21 million — a figure that caused uproar across Crete.
This money, the Chamber notes, does not build roads.
It simply patches over procedural failures.
And every cent ultimately comes from taxpayers.