Brussels, 22/04/2013 (Agence Europe) - In an interview with Greek newspaper Kathimerini on Monday 22 April, the president of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, said: “One lesson to draw from the Greek experience is that delaying the implementation of these reforms only exacerbates the situation”.
The president of the Commission encouraged the Greek government to “keep up the good record of policy implementation that has been built over past months” and paid tribute to the country's inhabitants for their resilience and sacrifices. He said it was important to move forwards rather than looking back, but said the problem had arisen from problems that governments had simply allowed to pile up.
In the same issue of Kathimerini, the head of the Council of Ministers' Euro Group, Austrian Thomas Wieser echoed Barroso's comments, saying that financial aid was inevitable given the Greek budget and economic crisis of 2009. He said Greece should have tackled its problems head on “many years earlier”. Wieser recognised, however, with hindsight that the Greek programme could have been based on more realistic projections and targets. The country's institutional creditors should have realised earlier than they did that the debt trajectory was not sustainable. The most recent Eurostat figures show that the Greek debt fell to 156.9% of GDP in 2012 from 170.3% previously (see related article).
During its recent fact-finding mission, the troika experts said the Greek programme was on track (see EUROPE 10827), but Greek Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras says the country's parliament will need to endorse a number of measures by Sunday 28 April, Bloomberg reports, if it is to win Eurogroup approval for payment of the next batch of aid (€6 billion, €1.8 billion of it from the IMF) at the Eurogroup meeting on Monday 13 May. The March loan amount (€2.8 billion) is expected to be disbursed shortly once it has been approved by the Euro Group. (EL/transl.fl)