Greece

Greece is planning a return to the markets in a bid to regain its status as a “normal” country. If the government can announce by the end of the year its program for tapping the markets in 2019, and repeat this exercise each year for the following 12 months, the plan will have worked, an official familiar with the matter said. After losing more than a quarter of its economic output during the past decade, Europe’s most indebted country is now trying to stand on its own feet again, Bloomberg News reported.

Greece is scheduled to exit its marathon bailout this summer after hitting the tough fiscal targets set by its creditors. But the country has done so by raising taxes so high that they are strangling the small businesses that form the backbone of its economy, The Wall Street Journal reported. At the Dandy restaurant in downtown Athens, owner Charalampos Bonatsos said rising taxes have forced him to lay off half his staff and cut his remaining workers’ wages. He said he still struggles to cope with the last three years’ increases in corporate income tax, property tax and sales tax.

Rebel shareholders narrowly won a vote to oust the entire board of Ellaktor, Greece’s largest construction company, at Wednesday’s annual meeting in Athens, the Financial Times reported. According to the final count of proxy votes, 52.92 per cent of votes cast were in favour of a new nine-member board to be headed by Georgios Provopoulos, a former central bank governor, as chairman, while 47.08 per cent backed the current board led by Dimitris Koutras, a co-founder of Ellaktor and Leonidas Bobolas, head of the company’s construction concessions arm.

Once the outcast of European bond markets, Greece appears firmly on the road to redemption. After years of austerity, the expiry of an 86 billion euro ($100 billion) bailout in August will mark the end of an era in which Greece defaulted, 10-year yields topped 40 percent and the country came perilously close to being kicked out of the euro, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story.

Even if he wins the battle for control of Ellaktor SA, Leonidas Bobolas plans to make way for new leadership at Greece’s biggest construction company, Bloomberg News reported. Bobolas hopes his move will help to end a bitter internal dispute over how to revive the firm that’s lost millions of euros in recent years and seen its share performance lag behind peers. Ellaktor’s chairman Anastasios Kallitsantsis quit last month to launch a campaign to replace top management, but Bobolas says the company had already hired consultants to reorganize its governance structure when that happened.

European Commission officials say Greece will still be subject to quarterly inspections from creditors after the bailout program ends in late August. Greece has already committed to two more years of budget austerity policies after its third consecutive international rescue program is concluded, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. But creditors on Wednesday said Greece will remain under an "enhanced surveillance framework" to ensure that it meets ambitious budget targets through 2022.

Greece exits its third international bailout in August, but without further debt relief it may not be able to sustain market access in the long run, the International Monetary Fund said on Friday. Greece and its European partners agreed last week on a set of debt measures to help the country emerge smoothly from the program, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. The deal significantly improved medium-term debt sustainability but "longer prospects remain uncertain," the IMF said.

Leonidas Bobolas, the scion of a powerful Athens business family, is battling to keep control of Greece’s largest construction company in a test of its willingness to adopt international corporate governance standards as the country emerges from a disastrous financial crisis, the Financial Times reported.

Moody’s has given its cautious blessing to the historic Greek debt relief deal hammered out in Luxembourg last week, the Financial Times reported. The eurozone agreement gave the southern European country “significant further debt relief that ensures the Greek government has very moderate refinancing needs for the next 10 years”, the rating agency said, marking a shift in position from the more sceptical stance taken on previous plans to cut Greece’s debt burden.

In a way, the debt relief deal Greece has received as it exits its bailout makes good sense: It keeps the country on a tight leash, all but eliminating the possibility that it will go on a borrowing spree in the financial markets and misspend the money as it’s done before, a Bloomberg View reported. On the other hand, the scheme gets superimposed uncomfortably onto the country’s political cycle: It puts the next government on the spot, making a backlash against it all but inevitable.