German minister due in Greece

Westerwelle was to meet Evangelos Venizelos, who brokered a debt write-down last year and became foreign minister and deputy prime minister last month in a government shake-up.

Today, he will see Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, who now leads with a wafer-thin, two-party majority after moderate leftist party Democratic Left quit the ruling coalition.
“It’s a visit with the aim of encouraging the Greek government and the Greek people to continue on the path of reforms after all the steps already taken,” a ministry spokesman told reporters.

Germany is the paymaster for the international bailouts for Greece but has triggered widespread anger in the debt-mired nation for an insistence on biting budget cuts in return for assistance.

Chancellor Angela Merkel faced mass protests during a visit to Athens last October.
Experts from the European Central Bank, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund are currently in Athens to review Greece’s progress in implementing deep reforms.

On the basis of their findings, a Eurogroup meeting in Brussels on July 8 will determine whether Greece can draw 6,3 billion euros from its ongoing bailout.
The IMF is also scheduled to decide by the end of July whether to disburse its own scheduled contribution of 1,8 billion euros.

Since 2010, the EU and IMF have committed a total of 240 billion euros to the heavily indebted country.
Merkel said in an interview published yesterday she believed Greece could cope with its enormous debt without any new imposed write-down.

“I expect that debt sustainability will continue to be a given,” Merkel told reporters from six European newspapers.
And ECB executive board member Joerg Asmussen said that talk of new Greek debt write downs was “not helpful”, urging Athens instead to push on with reforms.

Last year, Greece erased nearly a third of its overall debt through an unprecedented write down of more than 100 billion euros held by private creditors including banks and pension funds.

Nearly 30 billion euros of additional debt were subsequently recovered in a buyback achieved with bailout funds.
Merkel, who faces a general election in September, was yesterday hosting a pan-European meeting in Berlin on tackling critically high youth unemployment in stricken eurozone countries such as Spain, Portugal and Greece. — AFP.