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The Ministers of Finance from the Eurozone are coming to the Eurogroup Monday meeting with low expectations about Greece. “We are still far from final agreement”, a high-ranking European officer said yesterday in Brussels and explained that on Monday the Ministers will just make an assessment of the situation, based on institutions’ reports. At the same time, he left a door open for an existing probability of making an announcement from Eurogroup that will admit the progress achieved on the negotiations, but also stated that this “wouldn’t be anything in particular but just a valuation of the discussions”.
Same European officer has emphasized the long way the two parties still have to go in the negotiations and noted down, that he hasn’t yet understood which are the 70% from the Memorandum the Greece accepts, and which are the rest 30%, that Greece wishes to change – a matter which was expected to be made clear before the beginning of negotiations. He has admitted however that the manner and organization of the negotiations have been improved, resulting in progress on number of subjects, but still not a final agreement on any of them. “The detailed discussion of the themes hasn’t yet started” he added. And as usual, no theme will be closed, until they are closed all together.
Although Athens has alarmed about having problems with liquidity of the country it doesn’t seem that Brussels is sharing their uneasiness. European officer has expressed his certainty that Greece will easily pay the forthcoming tax commitments. As far as it concerns the question if The European Central Bank will increase the limit for issuing of securities in case there is a positive statement from Eurogroup on Monday, the officer said this is a decision of the Board of Directors of the bank, not of Eurogroup. According to source from The Central Bank, the increase of limit is not going to happen after a simple statement from Eurogroup. In order something like this to become a fact, there has to be provided a tranche of the European mechanism for backing the International Monetary Fund /IMF/.
To the question if we should expect a “second Riga” again at this meeting of Eurogroup the European representative emphasized that the tone of talks in the capital of Latvia had surprised him, but nevertheless the discussions have been even more effective than they were presented in some media.
TERMS
With regards to the time schedule, the prolongation of the program finishes in eight /8/ weeks at the end of June. “If the assessment process doesn’t finish until beginning of June, we shall have a problem”, the source said. He explained that the end of May is the dead line for to have enough time for validating the assessment and transferring the tranche, as well as for a discussion concerning the Agreement for the “following day”. The same source explained also that such a discussion at level Eurogroup or Euroworking group haven’t started and prior to its start, the current assessment have to finish.