The fund to reinvent Greece
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The fund to reinvent Greece

Aerial photo of the highway over the Corinth canal in the Peloponnese, Greece
Photo: Getty Images

Growthfund was formed six years ago as a steward for Greek state-owned enterprises in the hope of improving and extracting value from them. As chief executive Gregory Dimitriadis explains, its ambitions now include investment, emission reduction and enabling the flow of capital from the Middle East.


Few nations have had a more eventful 15 years economically than Greece. More or less consistently since 2007 it has suffered both international crises with profound impacts on the country’s finances and debt crises all of its own.

Growthfund, a sovereign wealth vehicle established as Hellenic Corporation of Assets and Participations (HCAP), is in some sense a mirror and response to these times, having been formed in 2016 during the third economic adjustment programme of the Greek debt crisis.

In the eight years before its launch, Greek GDP had dropped by a quarter while unemployment had risen by the same amount, bad debts were up by half and Greece’s sustainability as a eurozone nation had been in doubt throughout.

Growthfund, as it became officially known this year, was set up to encourage state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform, but it also has a broader overall ambition: to bring financial stability, good governance and professionalism to the whole institutional idea of Greece.


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Asia correspondent Euromoney
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Chris Wright is Euromoney’s Asia correspondent. He covers the Asia Pacific region and is based in Singapore. He has previously been Middle East editor of Euromoney, editor of Asiamoney, investment editor of the Australian Financial Review and a correspondent on emerging markets and sovereign wealth for numerous publications worldwide. He has also written three books.
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