New board members added to DEPA’s fresh leadership

A relatively rough week experienced in the change of leadership at DEPA, the Public Gas Corporation, appears to have ended as intended.

An interim administration needed to be forced upon the outgoing DEPA chief executive officer Theodoros Kitsakos, who initially refused to step aside and make way for the new leadership, named last week.

Following up on last week’s appointment of Dimitris Tzortzis (photo) as new chief executive officer and Velissarios Dotsis as president, the gas utility’s shareholders – TAIPED, the state privatization fund, and ELPE (Hellenic Petroleum) – have also replaced two board members with Nikolaos Lionis and Panagiotis Dimitropoulos, energypress sources have informed.

TAIPED controls the Greek State’s 65 percent of DEPA, and ELPE, Hellenic Petroleum, holding the gas utility’s other 35 percent.

DEPA’s new leadership was approved at a general shareholders’ meeting last night, sources informed.

A professor of economics whose track record includes work at various agencies and academic tenures, Lionis is a member of energy minister Giorgos Stathakis’s team of advisers.

Hailing from the private banking sector, his most recent post being at Piraeus Bank, Dimitropoulos is believed to have been handpicked for DEPA’s board by TAIPED’s recently appointed new leaders, Aris Xenofos, the president, and Rihardos Labiris, the managing director.

Both Xenofos and Labiris were preferred for TAIPED’s leading posts by Stathakis, the energy minister.