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The consultants from Lazard, HSBC and Deutsche Bank requested to postpone the submission of the report containing proposals for the banking system reform. The report was supposed to be announced in early October. It should be submitted to the end of the year but the reasons for the postponement are not officially announced yet. However, there was a certain divergence of views of various government officials in recent days. Most impressive was the statement of the new Minister of Agriculture Kostas Skandalidis that the expert mission insists on the closure of the Greek Agricultural Bank (ATEbank).

At the same time, the government's official position is that Greek banks are healthy and do not need state intervention, but it definitely supports the idea for their reformation. The Prime Minister George Papandreou shared with Reuters his vision for the reform of the banking system in Greece, saying that a strong state-owned bank and two or three private banks are sufficient to meet the local market needs in the near future. To build the right model of this reform, the government resorted to the consulting services of the three international corporations Lazard, HSBC and Deutsche Bank. It is not a secret that the Greek banking system became quite dependent on the liquidity that the European Central Bank granted to it from the middle of the year and that their access to the international credit markets was limited because of the swollen external debt and the crisis it caused.

Scenarios of merger, reform and transformation of the banking market in Greece have become the topic of the 2010 summer, when Piraeus Bank boldly offered to buy a significant part of the state owned Agricultural Bank and Postbank. The proposed amount was € 701 million. Some days later, the Agricultural Bank was the only one of the six Greek banks that did not pass the European stress-test and it had to immediately increase its capital. According to the latest report of the International Monetary Fund, the state ATEbank and the Deposits and Loans Fund have violated the principles of competitiveness in the past and they lacked transparency in some cases. Analyzing this claim, the Greek edition Elevtrotipia argues that the Agricultural Bank has granted large amounts of the so-called unpayable loans, and the Deposit and Loans Fund has offered interests on deposits unusually high for the average market level in prior periods. Whatever the "sins" of the two state financial institutions in the past, today the government looks forward to reform the banking system through associations, mergers and acquisitions.

And while the Prime Minister George Papandreou promotes the good state of Greece and looks for new investors, the Minister of Agriculture Kostas Skandalidis said with frustration to reporters: "The Troika wants to close the Agricultural Bank." This statement surprised the other members of the government and neither the Minister of Finance George Papakonstantinou, nor the Prime Minister George Papandreou commented on the statement of the Minister of Agriculture. The official government position is that the consolidation of the banking system in the new economic conditions is necessary and we could not speak of pressure exerted by the expert Troika. The representatives of the mission themselves stressed over a month ago that they are not able and it is not their obligation to set the policy that the Greek government should follow. We offer suggestions, we give no orders, said the responsible representative of the International Monetary for Europe Fund Paul Thomsen at a press conference in August, emphasizing that the Greek government takes the final decisions.