Brussels, 17/12/2013 (Agence Europe) - The Council of Ministers' euro working group gave the go-ahead on Tuesday 17 December to the payment of a €1 billion sub-instalment of aid for Greece that has been on the back burner for a number of weeks. It was initially scheduled to be disbursed in October, if various benchmarks were met. The troika of lenders (European Commission, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund) left Athens for a while, with the intention of returning in January to sort out the outstanding issues so that the monitoring mission that began in September could draw to a close. The European Financial Stability Fund will make the payment later this week. Half of the billion euro is profit made on the SMP programme by Eurosystem banks (see EUROPE 10884), which will go straight into an account used solely for debt servicing. The final benchmark that needed to be introduced for the loan instalment to be approved was restructuring the Greek defence system, EAS. (EL/transl.fl)