Brussels, 26/02/2015 (Agence Europe) - The Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, has repeated that the profits (€1.9 billion) to be on-lent by the ECB to Greece could be transferred directly to the IMF, which the country has to pay €1.5 billion back to in March.
“This is money we are owed. This is our money”, an overpayment to the ECB, the minister explained on Thursday 26 February, in an interview with Bloomberg Television.
The Eurogroup's declaration of 20 February, to which the Greek minister also put his name, however, reiterates that the transfer of these profits, like the final tranche of aid of the European Financial Stability Fund (EFSF), is subject to the completion of the monitoring mission of the 'institutions' (European Commission, ECB and IMF) and conditional on the prior agreement of the Eurogroup.
“We will not have liquidity problems for the public sector. But we will definitely have problems in making debt payments to the IMF now and to the ECB in July”, Varoufakis acknowledged, in Athens on Wednesday. In an interview with Bloomberg, however, he said that he was confident that the government would not have a problem: “because we all struggled very hard through long hours of discussions with our partners to come to this stage, I find it very hard to imagine that Europe and the IMF will allow us to trip over what is a relatively small cash problem”. He went on to explain that the deposits withdrawn from the banks were starting to come back in.
According to Minister of State Alekos Flabouraris, speaking on the television channel Mega, the Greek government intends to ask for two months to pay the IMF back, if it is unable to collect sufficient revenue.
This Friday, the German Bundestag will vote on the extension of aid to Athens. In order to encourage the CDU members to get behind this extension, the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, explained that the extension can be cancelled if Greece fails to stick to its commitments. One of the commitments - continuing privatisation already started or underway - has come up against resistance within the Tsipras government. The minister for the economy, George Stathakis, explained that the privatisation of the port of Piraeus would be cancelled and the project for the airports drastically revised. His counterpart for energy, Panagiotis Lafazanis, rejected in its entirety the privatisation of part of the electricity company PCC and of the gas company DEPA. (Elodie Lamer)