Greece is close to a deal with its international creditors over thousands of job cuts aimed at clearing the way for the debt-laden nation to receive the next tranche of bailout funds worth 8.1 billion euros (US$10.4 billion), officials said.
“Very important progress was made,” a Greek Ministry of Finance official said late on Saturday after several hours of talks with representatives from the “troika” of lenders: the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF, the state-run Athens News Agency reported.
Another official from the Greek Ministry of Administrative Reform told reporters: “We are in agreement, no new meeting is required” on a thorny dispute involving thousands of civil service layoffs.
Photo: Reuters
Greece needs to come to an agreement on the next package of reforms with the troika before today, when the Eurogroup meets to decide if the bloc should release the next instalment of rescue funds worth 6.3 billion euros.
The IMF is also scheduled to decide by the end of this month whether to disburse its scheduled contribution of 1.8 billion euros to the bailout kitty.
The funds are necessary as Greece must redeem three-month and six-month debt worth 6.6 billion euros by the middle of next month.
Among the reforms being negotiated are 4,000 state jobs, which would have to go by the end of the year. Greece must also redeploy 25,000 civil servants across its vast bureaucracy. These include hundreds of teachers, whom Athens has proposed to move to other state services.
Another 3,500 municipal police are to be incorporated in the national forces, a proposed move that has sparked strong opposition from local administration staff.
The latest cuts will be enshrined in a new multi-purpose law that will be tabled in Greece’s parliament today.
Since 2010, the EU and IMF have committed a total of 240 billion euros to the heavily indebted country.
In exchange for the funds, Greece has agreed to a series of reforms, including a commitment to raise revenues by offloading state assets.
However, Athens has been forced to once again scale back the expected revenues from its privatization drive for this year to 1.6 billion euros from the 2.6 billion euros forecast earlier.
The missing billion is to be rolled over to next year, a Greek official told the Athens News Agency.
Athens last month failed to sell DEPA, Greece’s public gas distributor, after Russian giant Gazprom JSC pulled out of the bidding process.
Greece has pledged to raise 9.5 billion euros in asset sales by 2016, slightly less than one-fifth of the original target of 50 billion euros.
IN THE AIR: While most companies said they were committed to North American operations, some added that production and costs would depend on the outcome of a US trade probe Leading local contract electronics makers Wistron Corp (緯創), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶) are to maintain their North American expansion plans, despite Washington’s 20 percent tariff on Taiwanese goods. Wistron said it has long maintained a presence in the US, while distributing production across Taiwan, North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. The company is in talks with customers to align capacity with their site preferences, a company official told the Taipei Times by telephone on Friday. The company is still in talks with clients over who would bear the tariff costs, with the outcome pending further
NEGOTIATIONS: Semiconductors play an outsized role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development and are a major driver of the Taiwan-US trade imbalance With US President Donald Trump threatening to impose tariffs on semiconductors, Taiwan is expected to face a significant challenge, as information and communications technology (ICT) products account for more than 70 percent of its exports to the US, Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER, 中華經濟研究院) president Lien Hsien-ming (連賢明) said on Friday. Compared with other countries, semiconductors play a disproportionately large role in Taiwan’s industrial and economic development, Lien said. As the sixth-largest contributor to the US trade deficit, Taiwan recorded a US$73.9 billion trade surplus with the US last year — up from US$47.8 billion in 2023 — driven by strong
AI: Softbank’s stake increases in Nvidia and TSMC reflect Masayoshi Son’s effort to gain a foothold in key nodes of the AI value chain, from chip design to data infrastructure Softbank Group Corp is building up stakes in Nvidia Corp and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the latest reflection of founder Masayoshi Son’s focus on the tools and hardware underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). The Japanese technology investor raised its stake in Nvidia to about US$3 billion by the end of March, up from US$1 billion in the prior quarter, regulatory filings showed. It bought about US$330 million worth of TSMC shares and US$170 million in Oracle Corp, they showed. Softbank’s signature Vision Fund has also monetized almost US$2 billion of public and private assets in the first half of this year,
POWELL SUCCESSOR: US Fed Governor Adriana Kugler’s resignation gives Donald Trump an opening on the board, potentially accelerating his decision on the next chair US President Donald Trump suddenly has a chance to fill an opening at the US Federal Reserve earlier than expected, after Fed Governor Adriana Kugler announced her resignation on Friday. It might also force him to pick the next Fed chair months sooner than he had anticipated. “The ball is now in Trump’s court,” LH Meyer/Monetary Policy Analytics Inc economist Derek Tang said. “Trump is the one who’s been putting pressure on the Fed to do this and that, and Trump says he wants to have his own people on. So now he has the opportunity.” Kugler’s exit unfolds amid unprecedented public pressure
RSS