The Limassol Chamber of Commerce and Industry will very soon present to the competent Ministry the new business model it undertook to propose, on the basis of which the Technology Park in Pentakomo will be re-announced, Chamber President Andreas Tsouloftas told "Entrepreneurial Limassol". The LCCI President added that this is a specific, comprehensive proposal concerning what budget the Ministry of Energy, Commerce and Industry should keep in mind, that it should invest in Pentakomo and which infrastructure projects should be implemented in order to make the project viable and attractive.
Mr. Tsouloftas explained that the study has assigned the preparation of the proposal to a member of its Board of Directors, who specializes in such issues, the relevant work is at an advanced stage, and once completed it will be put before the competent Minister. Minister George Papanastasiou had stated after a recent meeting between the two sides, that the ball is in LCCI's court, to prepare and present to the Ministry the relevant proposal, which will not expect investors to implement the project in its entirety, in that the state will create infrastructure and a central platform, on which it the investor to be selected will build. "We are trying to increase the number of stakeholders and the chances of implementing the project, because the efforts so far (for 15 years) have been unsuccessful," Mr. Papanastasiou said, adding that he considers it useless to re-announce the project with a failed model.
It should be recalled that stakeholders and investors identified substantial discouraging factors in the proposal of the competent Ministry for the Technology Park in Pentakomo, in the context of the relevant public consultation held at the Limassol Chamber of Commerce and Industry at the beginning of this year. They stressed that a clear business plan must be defined for this in order to attract the interest of international companies.
One of the interested parties had indicated at the time that to participate in the tender one would have to spend millions on documents and stressed that options should be given for the expansion of the Technology Park. Other interested investors had pointed out that speed is very important and stressed that the project would become more attractive if the state built the infrastructure in advance.
