Greece

Greek lawmakers voted late Friday to increase taxes on middle- to high-income earners, self-employed professionals and businesses despite vehement objections by the political opposition and several ruling coalition deputies who said austerity-weary citizens should not be subjected to further pain, the International Herald Tribune reported.

A multimillion-dollar embezzlement case involving Greece's national tourism agency has dealt a new blow to the crisis-hit country's political establishment, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Auditors in December were asked to examine what government officials say is a hole in the agency's books, after an incident involving an allegedly fraudulent check raised questions about possible corruption at the agency. The auditors have discovered a series of improper transactions totaling about €12 million ($15.8 million) and extending back as far as 2003.

Next year will be “a make or break” year for Greece’s future as a member of the eurozone, the country’s finance minister has said, warning Europe’s leaders that Athens still faces “the possible risk” of crashing out of the currency bloc.

Maria Katri sent her son to live at a charitable home for poor boys after Greece's economy crashed, The Wall Street Journal reported. Now, as Greece slides deeper into depression, the widowed mother is so poor that her teenage daughter, who stills lives at home, is "jealous that her brother is having a better time than her in the institution," Ms. Katri says. The spread of economic hardship is fraying Greece's social fabric and straining its political cohesion as the country enters the harshest winter of its three-year-old debt crisis.

Greece is failing to collect the tax it is owed and is in danger of missing key targets that need to be met to reduce the government's staggering debt pile, the European Union warned on Monday, the Associated Press reported. An EU task force helping Greece overcome the financial crisis that brought it to the brink of bankruptcy said Athens still has trouble dealing with old, outstanding tax claims. With 2 months to go in 2012, it was still about a billion euros behind the EU target of recovering (EURO)2 billion ($2.6 billion).

Euro-zone finance ministers on Thursday backed the release of long-delayed aid payments to Greece, saying the first batch of money will be sent to Athens in the coming days, The Wall Street Journal reported. Euro-zone leaders and the International Monetary Fund agreed last month to provide the next installment of about €34 billion ($44.5 billion) in loans if Greece met certain economic conditions and retired a sizable portion of its private-sector debt by buying back its bonds at deep discounts to face value.

The Greek government is on course to receive a long-delayed €34.4bn aid payment after it fell only just short of its target in a bond buyback programme intended to wipe about €20bn from Athens’ sovereign debt pile, the Financial Times reported. According to people briefed on the transaction, Greece on Tuesday night had received offers from private investors to sell €32bn in bonds back to Athens for an average of 33.5 cents on the euro, in essence agreeing to a 66.5 per cent voluntary loss on their holdings.

Greece is near to reaching its target in a buyback of sovereign debt that will unlock aid from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, according to a Greek government official, Bloomberg reported. The amount offered in the buyback of Greece’s bonds is close to 30 billion euros, the official at the Finance Ministry said on condition of anonymity, referring to the face value of the securities. The transaction went “very well,” Prime Minister Antonis Samaras told reporters in Munich late Saturday after meeting leaders of the German state of Bavaria.

Greece's debt agency launched a multibillion-euro offer to retire roughly half the debt the country owes to private creditors, part of the latest effort to trim a towering debt burden, The Wall Street Journal reported. Bond markets reacted positively after Greece signaled it would pay a slight premium to buy back that debt, but the higher price and the limited size of the offer raise questions about whether the country will be able to cut its debt as much as its European and international creditors hope.

Greece will unveil details of a bond buy-back crucial to efforts by foreign lenders to trim the country's ballooning debt, hoping the terms will draw enough investors and unblock vital aid, Reuters reported. Since plans for the buy-back were announced on Tuesday, questions have swirled about whether it will tempt enough bondholders to cut Greek debt by a net 20 billion euros (16.2 billion pounds).