–FinMin: Under The Condition That Greek Budget Deal Done This Weekend
BERLIN (MNI) – German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble on Friday
reaffirmed that the German government will aim to get an aid package for
Greece through parliament next week if Greece reaches an agreement with
the ECB, the IMF and the EU on a budget consolidation plan this weekend.
“I’m very keen to take care — if we have a result [from the
negotiations] with Athens over the weekend — that we adopt [an aid
bill] in the German parliament within one week,” Schaeuble said at a
joint press conference with his Italian colleague Giulio Tremonti at an
event organized by the Aspen Institute here.
Schaeuble repeated that Germany planned to provide its share of the
Eurozone-wide agreed loans to Greece via the state-owned KfW bank. The
government would then guarantee these loans.
The Minister suggested that the budget consolidation program that
the EU Commission, the ECB and the IMF are brokering with Greece will
make sure that the loans will be repaid by Greece. “We assume that no
[German] budget resources will actually be drawn on,” Schaeuble said.
Asked if a newspaper report was true that the German government
wanted to call on banks to voluntarily buy more Greek bonds, Schaeuble
only replied that “this is the charm of our free society that nobody is
being hindered in doing voluntarily all sorts of things.”
He stressed that Greece had up to now always serviced its debt “and
we’re not talking about a restructuring” of Greek debt.
Tremonti said there are no constitutional problems in Italy with
helping Greece. The Italian government is in a position to immediately
introduce an aid bill in parliament once the Greek budget plan is
agreed. Moreover, parliament will be no hurdle for aid to Greece because
even the opposition supports it, he asserted.
–Berlin bureau: +49-30-22 62 05 80; email: twidder@marketnews.com
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