Brussels, 10/03/2015 (Agence Europe) - Discussions between the three 'institutions' (European Commission, ECB and IMF) and the Greek authorities will resume in Brussels this Wednesday 11 March, whilst the technical teams will be travelling to Athens on the same day, the president of the Eurogroup, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, announced on 9 March, following the meeting of the finance ministers of the eurozone.
“It is vital to speed up the implementation” of the commitments made, explained Pierre Moscovici, commissioner for economic and financial affairs. “We agreed today that there is no further time to lose”, said Dijsselbloem. “We have spent now two weeks discussing who meets whom where, some people will have to work on the ground in Athens”, he added.
The Eurogroup particularly stressed Greece's commitment not to take any unilateral actions or to go back on any measures already agreed. Since the Eurogroup accepted the first list of reforms on 24 February, the government has drafted reforms to be proposed and we have submitted “a list of seven examples”, said the Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis. He went on to say that this list was “never meant to be a comprehensive list, just a first batch, then another batch”. He said that he had called last week for the technical discussions to start immediately.
The Greek minister said that his country would make available to the institutions all of the information they needed. But a 'cabal' of technocrats coming to Athens to impose, or try to impose, policies on the country was in the past, Varoufakis stressed. The French finance minister, Michel Sapin, said that he believed firmly in the need to break with previous methods. “Afterwards, will we be able to do our work without ever setting foot in Greece? No, obviously not. Therefore, there will be experts who will need to have discussions with experts in Greece in order to have all the figures”, he added.
When asked about the government's immediate financing requirements, Varoufakis went no further than to say that Greece was in a procedure which guaranteed, firstly, that the February agreement would be set rolling and, secondly, that in the context of the implementation, the cash flow situation of the Greek government would be guaranteed by the government in conjunction with its creditors.
“The first step is an agreement on the whole thing (…) and the second step is implementation”, Dijsselbloem explained, going on to stress that he was open to disbursement in two parts. “If there is time pressure for the financing needs”, then that should help the implementation of the commitments made, not the other way round, Dijsselbloem said.
On Tuesday, the European Commission confirmed that a meeting would be held, on Friday 13 March, between its President, Jean-Claude Juncker, and the Greek Prime Minister, Alexis Tsipras, by request of the latter. The day before, Tsipras will discuss the reforms to be implemented in Greece with the OECD in Paris. (Elodie Lamer)