Brussels, 03/09/2012 (Agence Europe) - On Saturday 1 September 2012, a group of independent experts working for the Portuguese parliament's public finance committee announced that Portugal will find it difficult to meet its deficit target for 2012, reports AFP. The experts say that the country's public deficit will stand at between 6.7% and 7.1% of GDP in the first six months of 2012, far behind the 4.5% target that the government has promised its international lenders to try to achieve. If this esimate proves to be accurate, then the planned budget consolidation measures will not be enough to achieve this year's budget deficit target of 4.5% of GDP, say the experts, the main reason for this being the sharp fall in tax income. On Sunday 2 September, the Portuguese prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, said he would continue to implement the country's bailout programme, which had to be pursued with determination and courage to avert failure. Speaking at the centre-right social democrat party's summer university, he said that the government wanted to complete the programme as quickly as possible in order to reverse the country's economic situation, admitting that the programme was extremely demanding, particularly amidst rising uncertainty and the economic slowdown in Europe. He said any adjustment of the programme would have to cover all the big objectives set out in the international aid programme. Passos Coelho added that the bailout programme had achieved positive outcomes in terms of cutting public spending. The troika fact-finders (from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) have been working in Lisbon since the end of August, preparing their fifth assessment of the reforms carried out under the aid programme. The leader of the socialist opposition party, José Seguro, will meet with the fact-finders on Wednesday. On Sunday, he called for Portugal to be granted at least an extra year to restore a healthy balance sheet. (SP/transl.fl)