Brussels, 25/09/2013 (Agence Europe) - According to Greek newspaper Ekathimerini on Wednesday 25 September, Greece is seeking flexibility from its international lenders for the introduction of one section of its structural adjustment plan.
Firstly, Greece wants the second phase of the process of adding 12,500 civil servants to a mobility programme to have the deadline of end of February 2014 rather than end of December 2013, as currently planned.
Secondly, it wants to renegotiate the status as “redundancies” of civil servants losing their legal appeals against the end of their temporary contracts, which the newspaper says applies to 6,000 people.
Troika experts (the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund) are in Athens at the moment for a four-point assessment of the country's structural adjustment programme: assessing the budget gaps for 2013 and 2014, working on the financing gap that will merge by the end of 2014 (ahead of a Eurogroup discussion of the matter in November), looking at the financing gap for 2015 and 2016 and assessing viability of the Greek debt. Reuters says that so far, the parties have agreed on a 4% estimate for the recession in 2013. (EL/transl.fl)