Financial Times
October 4, 2011
Eurozone finance ministers gave a clear indication they were preparing to paper over Greece’s failure to hit international lenders’ mandated budget targets for 2011, saying they would now evaluate Athens’ performance based on goals that combine both this year’s and next year’s finances.
The decision came a day after Greek finance minister Evangelos Venizelos acknowledged Athens would miss the 2011 benchmarks, which the European Union and the International Monetary Fund had set as a prerequisite for disbursing an essential €8bn bail-out payment that is already past due.
By combining 2011 with 2012 targets instead, the EU appeared to be preparing to fudge this year’s missed benchmarks, paving the way for the closely watched aid payment, which Athens says it needs in a matter of days or it will run out of cash. But senior eurozone officials warned they were likely to extract new concessions for 2013 and 2014 in the coming days before signing off on the new money.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the Luxembourg prime minister who heads the group of eurozone finance ministers, insisted that while the new measures would probably delay the payment until November, officials remained steadfast in preventing a Greek default.
“We had no one advocating a default of Greece,” Mr Juncker said. “Everything will be done to avoid that, and it will avoided.”
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