About three and a half years ago, lawyer George Voukelatos received a phone call from a good friend. “I want to see you urgently,” he said. At first, he was worried, but the friend reassured him that he was OK and they arranged to meet the next morning. At the meeting, he was surprised to hear the story of his 60-year-old friend, who wishes to remain anonymous.
One afternoon, he entered a betting shop. He played 5 euros on a ticket and a few weeks later, he learned that he had won 5 million euros. Voukelatos congratulated him – but that was not the reason his friend wanted to see him. “I don’t want this money. It came to me from God and I want to give it to people in need,” he told him. The lawyer was not surprised by his friend’s intention. He had just completed a successful career as an executive of a large company, he had financial security, a house, a car, and he had no children. He was self-sufficient. “His generosity touched me and I told him that I would help him with whatever he needed,” Voukelatos tells Kathimerini.
The lucky ticket holder wanted to allocate this money to families himself. To do it properly and legally, they decided to create a foundation. It was early June 2022 when they drafted the statute and submitted it to the Ministry of Finance. Three years later, the process has not been completed. “We met honest, understanding employees. But the gears of state bureaucracy are rusty,” Voukelatos explains. The file for the creation of the foundation made the rounds of three different ministries – at one point it was lost for months in one of them. There were pointless comments (such as changing some words in the statute) and when in 2025 the three required official signatures were finally collected, a cabinet reshuffle meant that the process had to start again from scratch. In the meantime, the obligation to obtain approval from the Anti-Money Laundering Authority was added.
Voukelatos understood that he had to push things forward. “I explained to them that if something happened to my friend, the money would be in dispute. On the one hand, the state would claim it, and on the other, his relatives.” He began making daily phone calls, as well as making personal visits to the relevant agencies. “Why are you in such a hurry?” an employee asked him suspiciously. “Do you know how many people will be helped with this money? Hundreds of families,” the lawyer replied.
A month and a half later, all three ministerial signatures were collected and the file reached the Presidency. On August 18, however, they were informed that there were objections: “You say in the statutes that the founder can, by means of a last will and testament, determine who will take over as president of the institution. We do not accept this.” Voukelatos did not understand the reasoning, but he gave them the green light to make whatever changes were necessary in order to complete the process.
Studies for window frames
Raycap, the high-tech company founded by the late Costas Apostolidis, has been quietly supporting projects and actions in various parts of Greece for years. One of them was the school that Apostolidis himself had attended in Drama. At one point, he noticed that the pine trees he remembered in the courtyard had been cut down and the space looked bare. He decided to invite the distinguished landscape architect Helli Pangalou to renovate the courtyard. Although at that time (early 2018) the legislation that allowed public bodies to implement donations based on private financial criteria had not yet changed, the municipality and Raycap decided that the company would directly carry out the project, so that it would progress quickly.
All the materials were procured and in August the crews worked feverishly to complete the sports fields before the start of the school year. By the end of 2018, 20,000 sq.m. of gardens were delivered, with sports surfaces, vegetable gardens and activity areas. During the restoration, Apostolidis noticed – and the school management confirmed – that the building’s window frames were in poor condition, and he learned that the children were cold in the winter, so he decided to replace them.
He hired a team of designers and asked them to start immediately so that the work could be completed that summer. However, when the file reached the Service for Modern Monuments of the Region of East Macedonia and Thrace, the answer was negative: The window frames were considered to be of cultural value and had to be repaired, not replaced. The Raycap team traveled to Xanthi and showed them photos that proved that they were completely rotten. They even invited the employees to the school to see the problem on site, but they never went. As a last resort and to move forward with the project, Raycap turned to the Department of Wood Pathology at the University of Thessaly, requesting a scientific opinion. The service accepted it, but requested a study for each of the 250 frames. And indeed, 250 separate reports were drawn up. The work was completed at the end of August 2021.
However, a few weeks after the school garden was inaugurated in 2018, a serious problem arose. A tri-axle truck from the municipality came in to remove branches and destroyed the garden’s entire irrigation system, creating a pond. When the Raycap team went to assess the problem, they saw that the sports facilities had also been destroyed, as no one had thought to lock the courtyard at night and youngsters used it to show off with their motorbikes. “We had to rebuild everything,” Raycap people said. They agreed that they would also take on the maintenance – temporarily, until August 2019. Seven years later, the courtyard is still being maintained by Raycap.
The same is happening with the swimming pool that Raycap recently handed over to the Municipality of Drama – an expensive and complex project whose maintenance cannot be undertaken yet by the local government. The idea began in 2020, when Apostolidis discovered that the old swimming pool at the same location had closed and the people of Drama were forced to travel to Kavala.
The municipality accepted the donation, but when it came time to issue the building permit, the regional authority vetoed it, claiming that the building was too close to the forest. The Raycap team tried in vain to explain that the new building was located further from the forest than the old one, and above all, that the forestry department had already approved the project. Ultimately, it took legislative regulation – a special provision passed in Parliament in January 2022 – to issue new building rules.
The work began the following June, without guidance on the project’s requirements from the municipality’s sports department, but with the decisive contribution of the local swimming club. The project was completed and handed over in November 2024. “Giving money is relatively simple, as long as you have it. Giving your soul is something else,” Penny Apostolidou, wife of Costas, who passed away in February 2024, tells Kathimerini. “When these obstacles arose, Kostas would not sleep at night.”
The languishing ambulance
The idea of donating an ambulance was born in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. A Greek man who had made a successful career as a computer engineer in Silicon Valley decided with his wife to build a house on the island of Andros and spend most of their time there. The two make donations through a foundation in the US and wanted to do something similar in their new home.
“One ambulance had been decommissioned and the other, 25 years old, was unable to serve the entire island,” the donor, who wishes to remain anonymous, tells Kathimerini. The reaction to hearing about the donation was enthusiastic, but his effort fell on deaf ears. “I was going crazy. To have the money, to keep telling them, ‘I want to give it,’ but seeing that they were incapable of completing the procedure.”
In the first communication with the local authorities, they told him that they would get back to him. Six months later, without any replies, he began his own market research. He found a two-year-old used ambulance in excellent condition in Hamburg. “I can bring it to Greece myself,” he suggested. They told him that it was not possible. When he asked for the specifications, they gave him a handwritten list.
Months later, in a new communication, a local official told him that perhaps the ambulance would go to another island where it would be needed more. Besides, they would have to find four drivers, and there was also the issue of the cost of gasoline and maintenance. “Maybe you should paint the school?” the official recommended. The donor was confused. He was starting to lose patience when someone suggested that he talk to Desmos, the nonprofit organization that has been mediating, among other things, the proper and rapid implementation of donations from the private sector to civil society organizations and the state for years.
The Desmos team contacted all the relevant organizations on the island and the Ministry of Health, securing the exact technical specifications and a commitment that the Hellenic National Center of Emergency Care (EKAB) would provide drivers and cover operating costs. They received three offers and proceeded with the purchase.
“Many times, even the civil servants themselves are not aware of the procedures that must be followed in a donation. Even for something simple, such as VAT exemption on a donation to the state,” explains Emily Kern, general director of Desmos. The ambulance remained in a warehouse for three months. “If I had ordered hearses, I can understand [the delay], no one would have complained. But isn’t that a shame?” the donor had said jokingly when he learned of the delay. The ambulance was finally delivered last June.