Greece

The European Central Bank was checking up on how well Greece is meeting its international bailout obligations Wednesday, a day after Germany’s finance minister said a third aid programme would be needed to keep Athens afloat, the Irish Times reported. Joerg Asmussen, a member of the ECB’s executive board, was to meet Greece’ prime minister, finance minister and central bank governor, and to have talks with Greek business leaders. His immediate concern is with the next tranche of aid from Greece’s second international bailout, due in October.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said Greece will need a third bailout, in the bluntest admission by a top German official that the €246 billion ($328 billion) of international aid loans pledged so far won't be enough to save Greece from bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal reported. "There will have to be another program in Greece," Mr. Schäuble told an election rally of his Christian Democratic Union party near Hamburg, news agencies reported.

The Greek government’s efforts to sell state-owned assets was sidetracked again when the chairman of the privatization agency was forced to resign after hitching a ride on the private jet of a Greek oil tycoon, the International Herald Tribune reported. One of the ways Greece plans to dig itself out of debt is through the sale of state-owned assets. But that effort has been besieged by missteps.

Four years ago Ioannis Marinopoulos, a seasoned financial investor, followed the advice of his banker and transferred all his savings into Greek government bonds, the Financial Times reported. “The investment case was that sovereign bonds were the safest possible haven if a crisis struck Greece . . . much better than bank deposits,” the 41-year-old economist said.

Greece has a primary surplus for the first time in, well, a very long time. The budget, mind you, is still in deficit, after social security payments, interest on the debt, and payments to local government, Bloomberg reported. Nonetheless, this is a major achievement. Greece may still be borrowing to fund its debt payments, but at least it's not also borrowing to fund new spending. The government has slashed spending by 8 billion euros, or 20 percent, for the first seven months of the year while tax revenue has risen about 11 percent, to 30.8 billion euros.

Greece has completed the sale of a controlling stake in the gaming company Opap to a group of Greek and eastern European investors, boosting the country’s chances of achieving this year’s €1.6bn target for privatisation revenue, the Financial Times reported. A contract signed on Monday in Athens provides for Emma Delta, an equity fund led by Jiri Smejc, the Czech billionaire, and Dimitris Melissanides, a Greek oil tycoon, to pay €650m for the state’s 33 per cent stake in Opap.

Nationwide spot checks by Greek tax inspectors have found that almost every other business is cheating the taxman in some way, as the debt-hobbled country's authorities struggle to improve revenue collection amid a crippling recession, the Associated Press reported. Despite repeated campaigns by successive governments to clamp down on tax fraud, it remains a major problem in Greece, which for the past three years has relied on vast international rescue loans to stave off bankruptcy.

Greece’s unemployment rate rose to a record in May, amid the sixth year of an economic slump that has been deepened by austerity measures tied to bailouts from euro-area governments and the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg reported. The seasonally adjusted jobless rate rose to 27.6 percent from a revised 27 percent in April, the Athens-based Hellenic Statistical Authority said in an e-mailed statement today. The median estimate of four economists in a Bloomberg survey was 26.9 percent. The April unemployment rate was revised from a previous reading of 26.9 percent.

The International Monetary Fund on Monday approved a further 1.7 billion euros ($2.3 billion) in funds for Greece's bailout program after completing the fourth review of the cash-strapped euro zone state, Reuters reported. Greece last week adopted the last piece of legislation its international lenders required to release the next batch of rescue loans, after two months of wrangling over unpopular measures to overhaul the economy. The total funds from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank comprise 5.8 billion euros.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Europe must keep up pressure on Greece to stand by its austerity pledges as he rejected the notion that the upcoming election has put debt-crisis management on hold, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Greece’s progress will continue to be monitored after euro-area governments last week approved the latest bailout transfer to keep the government in Athens funded through the Sept. 22 election in Germany. German lawmakers have until noon tomorrow to raise objections to the latest Greek tranche.