Agis Veroutis, a columnist for Capital.gr, published an opinion piece on August 5, 2026, arguing that Greece needs a "guillotine law" that would automatically repeal entire bodies of legislation within 90 days unless lawmakers replace them with a single, coherent code.
Veroutis wrote that Greece's economy is moving away from the European Union's average level of prosperity rather than converging toward it, and that Greek society is gripped by anger and fear over political developments. He said funds from the Recovery Fund that were meant to benefit society as a whole ended up enriching a minority, while the market suffers from a liquidity shortage even as the state collects a budget surplus larger than it needs to function.
He said Greece's production model has "rotted," not only because of low investment, low-value-added output and heavy dependence on consumption, imports and tourism, but because the rules governing production favor established, large companies over small and new ones.
Sixteen years of the same debate
Veroutis wrote that Greece has discussed "changing the production model" for sixteen years, a phrase repeated by prime ministers, ministers, banks, chambers of commerce and economic conferences, while the underlying rules that decide who can enter the market, who can get financing and who can survive the cost of compliance have stayed the same.
According to Veroutis, a new entrepreneur in Greece needs more than capital, a product and customers. He said they must navigate a maze of laws, amendments, joint ministerial decisions, circulars, licenses, certifications and conflicting interpretations. He said large corporations can absorb regulatory costs by hiring a few more staff in legal and compliance departments, but a four-person business may never get off the ground because of the same costs.
Citing the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Veroutis wrote that the accumulation of regulations increases complexity and administrative costs, making it harder for businesses to operate, innovate and grow.
Government's paperwork reform falls short, columnist says
Veroutis noted that the Greek government is replacing 25 supporting documents with sworn statements across 1,007 administrative procedures, a change estimated to spare citizens and businesses from submitting about 42.5 million documents a year. He called the measure useful and overdue, but said it does not change the production model, because it reduces the paperwork required for compliance without asking whether the underlying rule needs to exist at all.
The 'guillotine law' concept
Veroutis said he first heard of the "guillotine law" concept about fifteen years ago from a senior American diplomat, who described it as a process for restarting economies that had failed and needed to relaunch productive activity on rational terms.
Under the version he described, a law is passed that names a specific area of productive activity. Ninety days after passage, all existing national legislation governing that area is repealed in full: laws, individual articles, presidential decrees, amendments, joint ministerial decisions, ministerial decisions, interpretive circulars, administrative directives, exceptions and sub-exceptions all cease to apply on the same date. Veroutis said the 90 days are not meant for the government to discover what rules currently exist, but are a binding deadline for deciding what to keep, what to rewrite and what to let lapse.
Within that window, Veroutis wrote, the government and Parliament would have to draft and pass, from scratch, a single coherent code covering all licenses, obligations, rights, powers, deadlines, inspections, penalties and appeal procedures for that sector, replacing the old texts rather than stapling them together. Anything not incorporated into the new code by the end of the 90 days would simply cease to exist.
Protections would remain, columnist says
Veroutis wrote that the new code would still have to respect the Constitution and European Union law and would have to incorporate any obligations that require national regulation. He said protections for workers, consumers and the environment would not be abolished, only the Greek "maze" of contradictions, overlaps and exceptions built up around them. He said the draft of the new code, comments from interested parties and the justification for every exception should be published, so the public can see who asked for what and who decided to grant it.
Veroutis cited the World Bank's description of a regulatory guillotine as an evaluation of the entire stock of regulations followed by the automatic repeal, within a set deadline, of any that no longer offer social value.
Rules for the '91st day'
Veroutis said the process could not stop once the code takes effect. He wrote that from the "91st day" onward, any legislative change would have to amend a specific, explicitly named article of the unified code, accompanied by a public justification, an assessment of its administrative and economic cost, and a mandatory review date. He said no regulatory act or circular should be able to create an obligation not explicitly set out in the code, no change should be allowed inside an unrelated bill, and no exception should be granted without a named official taking public responsibility for it.
He warned that if the new code began changing every time a minister, agency head or parliamentary majority changed, it would turn back into the same tangle it was meant to replace within a few years.
Citing crisis-era losses
Veroutis pointed to the scale of Greece's financial crisis losses, citing International Monetary Fund figures from 2016 showing production had shrunk more than 25% since 2008 and investment had fallen more than 60%. He said Greece lost more than a quarter of its real GDP during the crisis but never rewrote the rules governing its economy, instead layering new laws on top of old ones, creating new oversight bodies to supervise mechanisms that had already failed, and digitizing procedures without asking why they existed.
Veroutis noted that Greece already has a Central Codification Committee, along with manuals, platforms and laws intended to promote good legislative practice. He cited the government's own website, which he said states that Law 4048/2012 on the subject "was unfortunately never implemented." He also cited an OECD assessment from 2025 stating that the ex-post evaluation of legislation in Greece remained at an early stage and that the mandatory review of significant regulations had not been applied.
Who benefits from complexity, columnist argues
Veroutis argued that regulatory complexity is not a dysfunction for everyone. He said it protects an administration that gains discretionary power, large corporate groups with legal teams, and organized interests that secure the exceptions they need. He placed responsibility on successive governments that responded to every problem with a new law, parliamentary majorities that passed lengthy amendments shortly before votes, ministries protecting their overlapping jurisdictions, and professional groups demanding new restrictions to close the door on newcomers.
He concluded that Greece's current production model rewards those already established and punishes those trying to enter, and that as long as the country keeps the legislation he called "rotten," the production model will not change.
