Zombie companies in Greece: active on paper, dead in practice

A Greek company can be "Active" in GEMI, the General Commercial Registry, and have done nothing for years. It is not deleted on its own. Someone has to close it, and most of the time nobody bothers.

I took the companies with share capital (private companies (IKE), limited liability companies (EPE) and SAs), the only ones that must publish financial statements, and counted how many do not operate.

Two ways to be dead on paper

Ghost. An active company that must publish but did not upload 2024 financial statements. The deadline passed in September 2025. There is no interpretation here: either you filed or you did not.

Dead. It uploaded 2024 financial statements, but with revenue under €500 and profit zero or negative.

The second test has "profit ≤ 0" for a specific reason: a genuine holding company has zero revenue but positive profit from dividends and participations. It is a live company that simply sells nothing. Without this condition it would count as dead.

The class of 2023

The companies founded in 2023 are the cleanest sample: they had all of 2024 to operate, and their financial statements were overdue.

More than 4 in 10 Greek companies founded in 2023 do not operate. Two years on.

Why energy is counted separately

The sector with the most zero-activity companies is energy, by a wide margin: 54% of all active energy companies are flagged.

But these are mostly solar (PV) vehicles under development. A park that has not started operating yet has no revenue, by definition. Calling them dead is wrong.

That is why they get their own line. The "ghost" group, however, I do not split by sector: whoever filed no financial statements at all is in breach, whatever they make.

The headline changes with how strict you want to be:

Which legal form dies most often

The EPEs in the sample are only 114 companies, so the 63.2% moves easily. But the SAs are 1,548, and the 49.4% is a stable number. SAs are often set up as vehicles or shells for a specific transaction, and they stay that way.

Not just a young-company thing

Across all active companies with share capital, of every founding year, that filed 2024 financial statements: 20,919 reported zero activity.

Of the 22,960 with revenue under €500:

The 1,933 with positive profit are left out as alive. Note that only 61 of them are typical holding companies with the matching activity code (KAD, the Greek extension of NACE). The rest make a profit from non-operating sources. So the definition keeps them out only just, but it keeps them out.

By founding year, today's dead companies:

The recent ones dominate, and some of them simply never started. But the tail going back does not fade out: 400 companies from 2017 are still there, active in the registry and zero in practice.

The total

The fairest sample is every active company with share capital founded before 1 January 2024. It lived through all of 2024 and certainly owes financial statements.

One in four filed no financial statements at all for 2024. With the dead ones added, the number goes to 33.6%.

Methodology

Snapshot of 20/06/2026, with the main tables recalculated on 30/06 after the separate energy category was added.

Filters: status Active, Greek, main establishment, legal form IKE, EPE or SA. Companies whose registration is suspended stay in: the suspension is a result of not filing, not a reason to exclude them.

The filing signal is the actual filing in GEMI, with a period that ends within 2024. Revenue and profit come from analysis of the filed financial statements themselves.

Companies founded in 2024 are excluded from the last sample, because the first financial year can be longer than twelve months and the obligation is uncertain.

What this analysis does not say

Zombie does not mean fraud. Most of these are companies that simply never operated or stopped, and nobody paid an accountant to close them formally.

It does not cover sole proprietorships, general partnerships (OE) and limited partnerships (EE). They do not have to publish financial statements, so the test does not apply. They are 64% of the economy by number of businesses and stay outside.

"Analysis pending" is not zero. 4,726 companies filed financial statements that have not been analysed yet. They will split into alive and dead, so the final share may move up a little.