Fraudsters working with notaries are registering ownership claims to land they encroached but never owned through Greece's newly completed National Cadastre, according to retired Supreme Court judge Leandros Rakintzis, who cited a recent report by the Court of Auditors warning of a looming wave of property disputes.
The National Cadastre is Greece's unified land registry, completed after decades of work to record ownership of every plot of land in the country. It replaced a patchwork system of local Mortgage Registries.
The Court of Auditors found that 3.45 million property rights of unknown ownership have been declared in the Cadastre, Rakintzis wrote. The court also warned of a substantial risk of encroachment and seizure of real estate through adverse possession claims, saying the practice undermines the security of property transactions and could trigger an explosion of ownership disputes in the coming years.
Rakintzis, a former justice of the Areios Pagos, Greece's Supreme Court of Cassation, described how the scheme works. Fraudsters declare land they have encroached to the Cadastre and claim they became owners through extraordinary adverse possession, a legal route to ownership based on long, uninterrupted possession of a property. Notaries who draw up sale contracts covering the encroached land assist the process, he wrote. Once the fraudsters obtain ownership titles, they resell the properties, erasing the trail of the fraud.
The properties typically targeted belong to owners who are absent because they moved to cities or emigrated, often to distant countries, Rakintzis wrote. Those owners discover the loss only when they return to their home village and find their property gone through what appears to be a lawful process. Although they can pursue the matter in court, he said such cases involve long and costly legal battles with uncertain outcomes, because the original owners often lack evidence such as local witnesses, who tend to side with the local land-grabber.
Rakintzis opened his column with an anecdote he said he could not vouch for but considered well invented. He recalled that in the 1920s, when Eleftherios Venizelos, a dominant Greek statesman who served multiple terms as prime minister, was in power, a powerful local party official named Nychas was a notorious land-grabber whom Venizelos repeatedly protected. Eventually, Rakintzis wrote, Venizelos lost patience and told him he would station him at the Greek-Bulgarian border so the two of them could gradually reach Sofia.
State land encroachments
Encroachments also affect public, public forest and private land, Rakintzis wrote. The Greek state has not recorded the whole of its real estate, and new properties are added daily through abandonments in the state's favour, inheritances, since the state inherits as sixth in line when no other heirs exist, auctions, and land reclaimed from the sea.
Of the state property that has been recorded and found to have been encroached by private individuals, the state has identified which properties can be bought back for a set price paid in long-term instalments. Of 90,000 encroached state properties, applications to buy back the land have been submitted for only 12,000, Rakintzis wrote. As a result, the state extended the deadline for submitting buyback applications by one year, to September 2027. He noted that no one can become the owner of state property through ordinary or extraordinary adverse possession, the method usually used by land-grabbers to acquire private property.
From Mortgage Registries to the National Cadastre
Before the National Cadastre was completed, the security of property transactions relied exclusively on the system of Mortgage Registries, Rakintzis wrote. That system was organised around the records of individual persons rather than the properties themselves, with protection provided through entries in transfer books recording documents such as sale contracts, acceptances of inheritance, court rulings awarding ownership, and concession deeds. Establishing a clear title required diligent research by a lawyer to trace the original acquisition of ownership.
With the completion of the National Cadastre and the abolition of the Mortgage Registries, ownership checks on a property are now carried out using its National Cadastre Code Number, known as KAEK, or the name of the purported owner, without reference to how ownership was originally acquired. Rakintzis wrote that this simplification of ownership checks has also reduced the volume of work available to lawyers.
