Skip to content. | Skip to navigation

Personal tools
Sections
You are here: Home Breaking news Greece to draw up list of state assets for sale

Greece to draw up list of state assets for sale

24 February 2011, 22:34 CET
— filed under: , , ,

(ATHENS) - Greece will name an advisor by the end of next month to draw up a list of state-owned assets which could be sold to help balance its strained public finances, the finance minister said Thursday.

"The government is going to name an advisor who will draw up a list of state property assets which could be sold" to reduce debt, Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said.

An initial list should be ready in June, with another to follow in December, he said, of a controversial privatisation programme introduced as part of a stinging austerity package after Athens had to seek and EU-IMF bailout in May.

Papaconstantinou said the government planned privatisation sales worth 15 billion euros ($20.63 billion) by 2013, with 50 billion euros worth due by 2015.

This latter target was not enshrined however in an agreed EU economic blueprint adopted to get the country back on its feet.

The 50 billion euros figure has proved highly controversial since it was first announced here by an International Monetary Fund official earlier this month following a review of Greek progress under the May rescue package.

At that stage, the government's agreed target with the EU-IMF was privatisation proceeds of just seven billion euros by 2013.

The announcement of the increased target caused an uproar in Greece where the austerity programme is hugely unpopular, with Papaconstantinou himself accusing the IMF, EU and European Central Bank of overstepping the mark.

The finance minister also said Thursday he was confident that Greece would see the repayment period of its May 110-billion-euro bailout package extended, with eurozone leaders "agreed in principal" on the issue.

"In principal, there is agreement on extending the repayment period ... over ten or eleven years," Papaconstantinou said.

"What remains to be done is to make this official because several countries want any agreement to be formally approved" at upcoming EU summit meetings in Brussels, he added.

Both the EU and the IMF have signalled previously that they were favourable to extending the repayment period which currently runs to 2015.

After debt-stricken Greece, Ireland was the next eurozone member state to need a bailout late last year as a mountain of debt saw the markets turn against Dublin, preventing it from raising fresh money on the markets.

Papaconstantinou said that while Greece was now going through the worst of its crisis, with the economy shrinking 4.5 percent last year, it would recover.

The government expects the economy to shrink another 3.0 percent this year before returning to growth of 0.1 percent in 2012.


Document Actions