Greece to get vital EU loan funds 'at last minute': report
(ATHENS) - Greece is to receive a vital 14.5-billion-euro loan instalment from the European Union "at the last minute" before a maturing debt payment this week, reports and analysts said on Monday.
Top-selling Ta Nea daily said that the money, part of a giant rescue package worth 110 billion euros (136 billion dollars) from the EU and the IMF, will arrive just in time to cover a nine-billion-euro Greek payment on Wednesday.
"The first instalment from the European Union will arrive by Tuesday, at the last minute before the maturing debt payment," the daily said.
Greek government officials and the Bank of Greece could not immediately confirm details of the transfer but a finance ministry source last week said the EU instalment would arrive early this week.
"Better at the last minute than never," observed Nikos Skourias, chief investment officer at Athens-based brokers Pegasus.
Greece drew the first funds from the package last Wednesday, getting 5.5 billion euros from the International Monetary Fund.
The next tranche of funds from the IMF and the EU will arrive in August, the newspaper said.
The expected arrival of the funds brought little joy on Monday to the Athens stock exchange where the general index dropped 2.24 percent in midday trading.
Skourias blamed the fall on concerns about the broader national debt situation in struggling European economies despite another EU-IMF debt rescue package worth almost one trillion dollars agreed for the eurozone last week.
"The markets strongly doubt that this package will provide a long-term solution," he told AFP.
"It's an injection of liquidity but not a long-term solution on sovereign debt," he said.
Athens is paying a painful price for the unprecedented bailout -- the first involving IMF aid to a member of the eurozone -- with the government forced to slash civil servants' pay and pensions while raising taxes.
It is battling to avert default whilst snared in a deepening recession and is trying to rein in a public deficit of over 30 billion euros to prevent a debt mountain of nearly 300 billion euros from growing even higher.
The austerity programme has put the government on a collision course with unions who have so far staged three general strikes in protest and are holding a fourth on Thursday.
A poll published Sunday in the Ethnos newspaper found that most Greeks, 58.8 percent, think their country will be able to steer clear of bankruptcy, while 36.6 percent considered default inevitable.
While 56.2 percent of the 1,028 people polled by the Marc SA institute considered the austerity measures to be necessary, 87.8 percent judged them to be unfair.
IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said Sunday that European nations took too long to respond to the Greek crisis.
"I am convinced that if the problem had been managed in February, the cost would have been less high. But it took too long," Strauss-Kahn told the same newspaper.