Greece is close to a deal with its international creditors over thousands of job cuts aimed at clearing the way for the debt-laden nation to receive the next tranche of bailout funds worth 8.1 billion euros (US$10.4 billion), officials said.
“Very important progress was made,” a Greek Ministry of Finance official said late on Saturday after several hours of talks with representatives from the “troika” of lenders: the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF, the state-run Athens News Agency reported.
Another official from the Greek Ministry of Administrative Reform told reporters: “We are in agreement, no new meeting is required” on a thorny dispute involving thousands of civil service layoffs.
Photo: Reuters
Greece needs to come to an agreement on the next package of reforms with the troika before today, when the Eurogroup meets to decide if the bloc should release the next instalment of rescue funds worth 6.3 billion euros.
The IMF is also scheduled to decide by the end of this month whether to disburse its scheduled contribution of 1.8 billion euros to the bailout kitty.
The funds are necessary as Greece must redeem three-month and six-month debt worth 6.6 billion euros by the middle of next month.
Among the reforms being negotiated are 4,000 state jobs, which would have to go by the end of the year. Greece must also redeploy 25,000 civil servants across its vast bureaucracy. These include hundreds of teachers, whom Athens has proposed to move to other state services.
Another 3,500 municipal police are to be incorporated in the national forces, a proposed move that has sparked strong opposition from local administration staff.
The latest cuts will be enshrined in a new multi-purpose law that will be tabled in Greece’s parliament today.
Since 2010, the EU and IMF have committed a total of 240 billion euros to the heavily indebted country.
In exchange for the funds, Greece has agreed to a series of reforms, including a commitment to raise revenues by offloading state assets.
However, Athens has been forced to once again scale back the expected revenues from its privatization drive for this year to 1.6 billion euros from the 2.6 billion euros forecast earlier.
The missing billion is to be rolled over to next year, a Greek official told the Athens News Agency.
Athens last month failed to sell DEPA, Greece’s public gas distributor, after Russian giant Gazprom JSC pulled out of the bidding process.
Greece has pledged to raise 9.5 billion euros in asset sales by 2016, slightly less than one-fifth of the original target of 50 billion euros.
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