–Adds Comment By Lawmaker To Story Sent At 13:06 GMT
BERLIN (MNI) – German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said
Tuesday he was “relatively confident” that the debt buy-back program for
Greek bonds on secondary markets would bring the desired result.
Schaeuble said that the Eurogroup and the IMF would evaluate on
December 13, after the debt buy-back, whether Greece’s debt
sustainability had been assured.
“I’m relatively confident that this can work,” Schaeuble told
reporters here. “We assume that this will come in on target.” The
minister said the money for the buy-back program would come from the
regular Greek aid program and from the sale of T-bills.
German Deputy Finance Minister Thomas Steffen said Greece would
make investors a buy-back offer which would reflect recent market prices
and should be “fair.”
Schaeuble said the Eurogroup was unanimous in rejecting the
possibility of a haircut on Greek debt held by the public sector. Due to
legal problems “all agreed on this,” he explained.
The minister acknowledged that there was still a “small” gap in the
financing of the rescue program until 2016.
Norbert Barthle, the budget speaker of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
CDU/CSU-FDP government coalition, said Tuesday that “nobody can rule
out” a haircut on Greek debt held by the public sector after 2020, when
the revised Greek program foresees a marked lowering of the overall
debt-to-GDP ratio.
–Berlin bureau: +49-30-22 62 05 80; email: twidder@mni-news.com
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