AFP –Eurozone finance ministers delayed the latest bailout disbursement to Greece on Wednesday awaiting clarification on a legal case against European experts who had worked on the Greek privatisation programme.
While officially approving the latest raft of reforms, eurozone finance ministers in a conference call put off the payment of 8.5 billion euros from Greece’s bailout.
The eurozone finance ministers “encouraged the Greek government to resolve the pending issues swiftly,” a statement from the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone bailout fund, said in a statement.
This would “pave the way for the approval of the third tranche” from the country’s 86-billion euro bailout, agreed in 2015.
Senior eurozone officials would meet again by teleconference on Friday in hopes of releasing the funds, instead of Wednesday as originally planned, the statement said.
Eurozone ministers struck a long-delayed bailout deal with Greece on June 13 to unlock the cash needed to pay back the european lenders.
The deal was to avert a repeat of the summer of 2015 when Greece spectacularly defaulted on an IMF loan, and allow Athens to meet seven billion euros of debt repayments due in July.
But Spain last month threatened to block the disbursement, angry that Athens has failed to drop a legal case against European experts who had worked on the Greek privatisation programme.
Greece’s supreme court on Tuesday dismissed the case, raising expectations that the last-minute snag would be quickly overcome.
The legal case concerns three advisors from Spain, Italy and Slovakia to the Greek privatisation agency, created at the insistence of Germany in the wake of the debt crisis in 2011.
The Greek courts initiated proceedings against the experts in 2014 after alleged irregularities in the sale of 28 real estate properties owned by the Greek state.
In 2015, a Greek prosecutor charged six officials at the country’s privatisation agency, three Greek nationals and three others appointed by the European Commission, for breach of duty in relation to a sale and lease-back deal of 28 state-owned buildings.
According to prosecutor, the Greek state suffered losses totaling €575,856,504.
The case referred to two auctions of state owned buildings The contracts were signed in May 2014 and the Greek state had to lease back the properties for twenty years in order to cover housing needs for public services.
Prosecutors also pointed out that in some cases, the “fair value of property” was underestimated, thus reducing the amount of money received by the state and that “the value of land was not considered as well as other factors of the real estate market.
The six denied the accusations, claiming that their role was merely advisory and not binding for the board of HRADF that had the final say.
