After Delay, Lenders Set To Visit Greece for Audit

November 3, 2013

REUTERS

BRUSSELS — Inspectors from Greece’s international lenders have put a postponed visit to the country back on the agenda and will return early this week after Athens made a new proposal on filling a gap of 2 billion euros in the 2014 budget, the European Commission has said.

The team of officials from the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, the group of lenders known as the troika, is set to decide on whether to approve the next installment of loans under Greece’s bailout program.

The officials on Friday received “further information from Athens, which means we can confirm our travel plans,” a European Commission spokesman, Simon O’Connor, said on Saturday. “Our team will thus be in Athens at the beginning of the coming week.”

The International Monetary Fund said its staff would resume work in Athens on Tuesday.

Euro zone officials said last week that their trip would be postponed because they had not been able to agree with the Greek government on how to close a €2 billion, or $2.7 billion, hole in the country’s 2014 budget. The government has vowed to impose no more austerity measures on Greeks already battered from three years of tax increases and pension cuts.

But the standoff was defused late on Friday when Greece sent the lenders information on how it could fill the fiscal gap and meet other bailout targets, including privatizations.

The inspectors visit Athens regularly to check progress on its bailout commitments. Their most recent inspection began in September before a pause was decided and was initially expected to resume at the end of October.

A financial lifeline has kept Greece afloat since 2010, with international lenders pledging €240 billion in loans in exchange for spending cuts and reforms.

A third foreign bailout, on top of the total €240 billion already allocated to Greece, is now expected to be needed.

Greece has experienced a six-year recession that has wiped out 40 percent of household disposable income and sent unemployment soaring to almost 28 percent.

The coalition government has said that international lenders should give it some room to breathe after austerity measures helped deliver a huge reduction in the country’s budget deficit