The Greek government and its European creditors opened talks on the new bailout agreement Tuesday, with technical staff tackling topics like pension and labor-market reforms ahead of high-level talks in Athens later this week.
The European Central Bank’s mission chief Rasmus Rüffer and his European Commission counterpart, Declan Costello, both arrived in Athens on Monday. The IMF’s newly-anointed mission chief Delia Velculescu, a Romanian economist who previously lead the Fund’s mission to Cyprus, is arriving later on once technical staff have laid the ground work for negotiations.
The group formerly known as the “troika” has now been joined by mission chief Nicola Giammarioli from the European Stability Mechanism, the eurozone’s bailout fund which will fund the third rescue package — earning the creditors the moniker “quadriga” from those following the talks. Athens refers to the creditor bodies as “the institutions,” but under any name their presence has been a thorny issue for Greek governments, past and present.
When the leftist-led coalition government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras took office in February it immediately began fighting to have the troika removed from Athens. Members of Tsipras’ hard-left party Syriza depicted the group’s presence as a ritualized humiliation of the Greek people. Negotiations took place in Brussels (and sometimes Paris) instead but still failed to produce a disbursement of funds from Greece’s previous bailout package.
“The troika returns to the scene of its crimes,” read a headline on Friday on Iskra, a news website run by Syriza members.
George Chouliarakis, a British-educated economist who has been a subtle presence in the Greek Ministry of Finance and the country’s negotiating teams in Brussels, is coordinating the talks for the Greeks, according to a ministry spokesperson.
The meetings in Athens are geared toward producing an agreement within the next two weeks to allow time for the resulting Memorandum of Understanding to be submitted for approval in the Greek Parliament and the assemblies of some other eurozone member states including Germany’s Bundestag. It also needs approval by the Eurogroup of finance ministers from the currency zone and finally the ESM.
On Tuesday morning, technical staff from the creditor group were spotted entering the General Accounting Office in Athens.
The Greek government has an additional deadline on Aug. 20 when it must repay €3.2 billion to the ECB, though if the full bailout package is not ready by then, the EU could further bridge financing.
“We are going to follow to the letter the Eurogroup and the euro summit agreement,” Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos said late Monday, announcing that meetings were getting underway. “I believe that we proceed in a very organized way and I hope everything has a positive end.”
Greece’s third rescue package is expected to comprise €85 billion over three years.