Greek state-owned armoured vehicle maker Hellenic Vehicles Industry S.A. (ELVO) has gone into receivership, after years of losses, following a ruling by the Thessaloniki Court of Appeals on 30 January, IHS Jane’s 360 reported. The decision follows a petition by the Greek State to apply article 14A of Law 3249/2005 and place the company in special receivership. ELVO has recorded aggregate losses of EUR100 million in 2006-13 and owes EUR48 million to suppliers and banks.

Members of a European Parliament committee investigating the role of the troika and the impact of its policies in Greece on Thursday heralded the end of an “interim” institution, to be replaced by a “more democratically accountable and transparent” inspection process, and underlined the need for debt relief if Greece is to emerge from a spiral of austerity, ekathimerini.com reported.

Greece’s parliamentary budget office has warned that the country’s taxpayers are exhausted after four straight years of tax increases, reducing the government’s chances of achieving ambitious 2014 fiscal targets agreed with international creditors, the Financial Times reported. The independent budget monitoring office, set up under the terms of Greece’s bailout by the EU and the International Monetary Fund, said in its latest quarterly report that additional tax rises would be unlikely to boost revenues but could result in higher levels of tax evasion and unpaid debts to the state.

Greece’s highest legal body is expected to demand a reversal of salary cuts for the country’s security services imposed as part of a second €172bn international bailout in a move that could derail this year’s budget and lead to similar claims by other groups of public sector workers, the Financial Times reported. A decision by the council of state leaked to Athens lawyers and local media ahead of its official publication rules that the cuts were unconstitutional and should be fully reimbursed, according to a person with knowledge of the procedures.

Greece’s finance minister says his government’s shrinking parliamentary majority has made it increasingly difficult to pass tough economic reform measures and called on the “troika” of international bailout lenders to be more realistic in its demands of Athens. Yannis Stournaras, who has been waging a four-month battle with bailout monitors over whether Greece is living up to the terms of its €172bn international rescue, said while Athens can continue to implement existing reforms – including better tax collection – ambitions for major legislative measures may need to be scaled back.

The head of the eurozone's bailout fund, Klaus Regling has ruled out the possibility of a restructuring of Greek debt, media outlet EU Observer reported on Tuesday. Speaking to Germany's Spiegel magazine, Regling - who heads the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), Greece's largest creditor with 133 billion euros in 30-year loans already disbursed at an interest rate of 1.5 percent - is quoted as saying "there will be no debt restructuring." "The interest on these loans was deferred for the next 10 years.

It's been a good year for the eurozone crisis in the sense that flare-ups have been few and minor. But here comes thinktank Capital Economics with the gloomy diagnosis that Greece's public debt (currently at 170% of GDP) is still unsustainably high and "the country's crisis is not yet over". That is despite the clear improvement in the public finances since the second bailout in 2012, The Guardian reported in a commentary. The problem is not the short-term one of plugging a funding gap (of maybe €11bn) for 2014 and 2015 that will appear next year.

For a year and a half, Antonis Samaras has kept Greece’s bailout programme broadly on track despite his coalition government’s shrunken parliamentary majority and resistance within his cabinet to implementing tough structural reforms, the Financial Times reported. For the Greek premier, stern admonitions from Angela Merkel, German chancellor, and other EU leaders that Athens must work harder to fulfil its obligations to international lenders have given way to recognition of the “sacrifices made by the Greek people” as fiscal targets are finally met.

Greece on Thursday outlined a 2014 budget that predicts a return to economic growth after six straight years of recession, putting the country’s prospects in an optimistic light, the International New York Times reported. But it came just two days after the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecast that the Greek economy would shrink again next year. And the budget, which was presented to Parliament, has not received the necessary approval of the country’s trio of international creditors.

Public services ground to a halt across Greece on Wednesday as the country's two largest labor unions called a nationwide general strike to protest the government's ongoing austerity program and as international inspectors arrived in Athens to review Greece's reform program, The Wall Street Journal reported. Central and local government offices were shut by the strike, schools and courts closed, while public hospitals were operating on skeleton staff.