Finance Minister Gikas Hardouvelis, in an interview with Greek MEGA TV channel, spoke of a period of adjustment until the country’s final exit from the memorandum.
“There will be an adjustment period for maybe six months or a year until we exit the memorandum, as it was the case in Portugal,” Hardouvelis noted, adding that during that period there will not be a strict surveillance by the lenders.
Hardouvelis underlined that the ‘exit from the memorandum’ was still the government’s policy but that it would take a new form. “We will be free to decide,” he stated and added: “It will be a new kind of relationship. This new relationship will be an issue of negotiation.” However, the IMF will not go away, intsead, it will be an “observer,” he said.
An EU official stated to Reuters news agency, that Eurozone ministers and Greece must decide on how best to help Athens at a meeting of finance ministers in Brussels on Dec. 8. That should give time for parliamentary approval before the December recess.
The official gave no details of what new aid might look like, but policymakers have said that the most likely tool is an Enhanced Conditions Credit Line, or ECCL, from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).
The Finance Minister also expressed his hope to “have an agreement on the memorandum and the debt before the Presidential elections,” adding however, that this did not depend exclusively on Greece.
Regarding the troika’s return to Greece, Hardouvelis said that it was a matter of days and added that “the current negotiation does not detail how the memorandum will end, but rather the form it will take the day-after,” he stressed. “The relationship with the lenders will last many years until we pay back 75 percent of the loan,” the minister concluded.
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