Responsibility for the ongoing destruction of the natural landscape at Mytakas beach in Milos is attributed to the local urban planning authority by Mr. Vasilis Papadimitriou, Supreme Court lawyer and legal representative of the Municipality of Milos for the legal actions aimed at stopping the project at the White Coast hotel complex.

In brief, Mr. Papadimitriou tells protothema.gr that, on its part, the Municipality of Milos has carried out all the necessary actions, despite delays caused by bureaucracy, the relocation of the Council of State, among other factors. These delays are clearly being exploited by the owning company, Prodea Investments, allowing it to push ahead at an intensive pace with the expansion works of White Coast at Mytakas—despite the fact that the law provides that works must be automatically halted as soon as a relevant Application for Suspension is filed and the competent urban planning authority is notified.

Therefore, as Mr. Papadimitriou assures, since the Municipality of Milos timely notified the submission of the Application for Suspension, responsibility for the fact that the project at Mytakas was never halted lies exclusively with the urban planning authority. In practical terms, given that the Application for Suspension was submitted in the last days of last December, the construction site at Mytakas in Milos should have stopped no later than the first week of January. This, however, never happened, as evidenced by the video and photographs published by protothema.gr on Sunday.

In addition, a report by protothema.gr on Monday night, January 26, following the uproar caused by Sunday’s initial publication, revealed that the Minister of Environment and Energy, Mr. Stavros Papastavrou, is taking urgent initiative ex officio and independently of the Municipality of Milos’ actions.

Specifically, according to information, the Ministry of Environment and Energy (YPEN) is proceeding with a triple intervention as follows:

1. The Ministry sends a document to the Milos urban planning authority, requesting the immediate suspension of works.
2. It orders an on-site investigation by the Authority for Transparency, and
3. It sends a letter to the Municipality of Milos emphasizing that, although the Application for Suspension and the appeal to the Council of State were filed, because they were not notified to the island’s Building Authority (YDOM), in practice the suspension of works at White Coast “got stuck” and never proceeded—meaning that, in essence, the Application for Suspension is treated as if it were never filed.

For this reason, Minister Papastavrou will demand that all prescribed legal and procedural steps be carried out swiftly so that the Application for Suspension becomes effective and works at Mytakas are halted—initially on a temporary basis.

At the same time, according to information, an in-depth investigation will be conducted into how and why this communication gap arose between the Municipality of Milos and the urban planning authority, as well as why a critical period of time was lost—namely, whether there was malicious intent behind this delay or whether it resulted from the well-known bureaucratic sclerosis, the chaotic structure of urban planning authorities in Greece, etc.

In any case, while concrete mixers and presses at Mytakas continue unabated, pouring tons of concrete onto the beach and extending the White Coast facilities almost to the shoreline, more and more details are coming to light about how we arrived at an ecological crime committed in broad daylight and just a few hundred meters from the iconic Sarakiniko.

Why the planning authority is at fault

The lawyer for the Municipality of Milos, Mr. Vasilis Papadimitriou, explains to protothema.gr that “at this moment, the application for suspension we submitted is pending adjudication before the Council of State. At the same time, a decision from the Ministry of Environment and Energy is pending regarding the application for administrative suspension, which we have also submitted.

“However, under the law (Article 52A of Presidential Decree 18/1989, as added by Article 11 of Law 3900/2010, Government Gazette A 213/17.12.2010), the works at White Coast should have been halted immediately once the Municipality of Milos notified the Application for Suspension that we submitted to the Council of State—that is, from the end of December 2025. I am not in a position to know the exact date on which the Municipality of Milos notified the Application for Suspension to the local urban planning service. I do know with certainty, however, that it was notified. But since then, no order prohibiting works at Mytakas has been issued by that service.”

According to the legislation cited by Mr. Papadimitriou, in summary, the Application for Suspension automatically entails the cessation of all works, initially on a temporary basis. The legally prescribed suspension period is set at 60 days and is counted from the moment the municipality notifies the application to the competent building authority, which does not fall under the municipality nor report to it, but rather to the Decentralized Administration and the Ministry of Environment and Energy.

Further analyzing the sequence of actions undertaken so far by the Municipality of Milos, Mr. Papadimitriou states: “Approximately one month ago (late December 2025), we submitted to the Council of State the application for suspension of the expansion works of the White Coast complex at Mytakas. The delay was due to the relocation of the Council of State to new premises.”

According to Mr. Papadimitriou’s assessment, the Council of State will issue its decision on the suspension application within the next approximately 20 days. At the same time, however, the ideal scenario would be for the Ministry to have already intervened.

As Mr. Papadimitriou notes, “the initial Application for Annulment was submitted by us toward the end of August 2025. At that stage, we were not yet in a position to submit an Application for Suspension, because we were unable to obtain the necessary information from the various involved services in order to complete the file. You know, the White Coast case is complex, as there are two expansion permits, so we had to distinguish the old one from the new one, etc. The older one, from 2019, no longer makes sense to challenge. We are proceeding against the new expansion, particularly the part that has not yet been built—the lower section on the slope, which reaches to within a few meters of the shoreline. Once we completed this clarification, we submitted the Application for Suspension.”

Concrete continues to flow

Meanwhile, as the decision of the Council of State and the intervention of the Ministry of Environment and Energy are awaited, the construction site at Mytakas continues uninterrupted and at an extremely intensive pace. In fact, what is depicted in the photographs and video is merely the first phase of the expansion. Once completed, the bungalows and suites of White Coast will literally reach the shoreline.

March 2025: What White Coast looked like when the other hotel construction case at Sarakiniko, Milos, was revealed

January 2026: How, within 10 months, reckless concreting has progressed in the Mytakas area of Milos for the expansion of the White Coast hotel

On October 21, the Municipality of Milos decided to grant a special mandate and power of attorney to Athens-based lawyer Mr. Vasileios T. Papadimitriou in order to proceed with the submission of an Application for Suspension of works at White Coast, as well as the suspension of implementation of the complex’s expansion permit.

More specifically, Supreme Court lawyer Vasileios T. Papadimitriou was authorized by the Municipality of Milos to undertake the following legal actions:

1. Drafting and filing an application for suspension, with a request for a temporary injunction, for the suspension of execution of the following acts:
   – Decision No. 21704/5.8.2024 of the Deputy Director General for Spatial Planning etc. of the Decentralized Administration of the Aegean, “Approval of environmental terms for the expansion on two adjacent plots with a total surface of 29,421.73 sq.m., of an existing activity and the operation of a hotel accommodation under the name ‘White Coast,’ 5 stars, with a total capacity of 125 rooms and 271 beds, at the location ‘Mytakas,’ Municipal Community of Triovasalos, Municipality of Milos, with operator the company ‘V TOURISM S.A.’ (PET 2310011321),”
   – Building permit revision No. 1148363/7.8.2024, with pre-approval, by which the addition by extension to an existing tourist unit of 13 new “buildings” (room complexes), pools, a helipad, and other auxiliary spaces was permitted, increasing the unit’s capacity from 58 to 125 rooms and from 104 to 271 beds,
   – Any other prior or subsequent explicit act or implicit negative response, which is deemed in advance as jointly challenged, as well as any subsequent revision of the challenged building permit.
2. Representation before the Committee for Suspensions of the Council of State in support of the application for suspension and the granting of a temporary injunction against the challenged acts.
3. Drafting and filing a detailed memorandum after the hearing of the suspension application in support thereof and the granting of a temporary injunction.

Previously—that is, before the decision of October 21, 2025—the Municipality of Milos had given the same lawyer, Mr. Vasileios Papadimitriou, a similar mandate for annulment. This mandate was given in August 2025, a date that could be considered a milestone for the start, albeit delayed, of the Municipality’s actions aimed at stopping the alteration of the natural landscape in the protected Mytakas zone, which is designated as grassland and lacks frontage on a public road. Consequently, both the original construction permit for White Coast and its enlargement through the current expansion works are being examined as illegal.

See the original documents: (a) the Application for Annulment drafted on behalf of the Municipality of Milos by Supreme Court lawyer Mr. Vasilis Papadimitriou, and (b) the mandate assigning the authorized lawyer to submit the Application for Suspension (21/10/2025) by the Municipality of Milos.

These documents record in every detail the progression of the concreting of Mytakas, which, to a very large extent, now appears increasingly irreversible.