Greece’s General Secretary of Fiscal Policy Frangiskos Koutentakis accused the International Monetary Fund of delaying the evaluation of the bailout program by making excessive fiscal demands and presenting inaccurate figures during negotiations.
Koutentakis accused the IMF of “ideological obsessions and inaccuracies” over the differences in fiscal targets, thereby putting hurdles on the completion of the evaluation.
“They are responsible because they want to get us to the edge of the cliff. They create and maintain uncertainty,” over whether the review will be concluded or not, the Greek official said.
“We keep telling them that uncertainty costs dearly to the real economy, but they pretend they do not understand and issue recommendations about which expenditures we should cut,”Koutentakis stated.
The finance ministry official also asserted that the creditors’ technical experts had often proposed delaying the payment of public sector salaries and pensions if the funds for meeting the country’s obligations were not there.
Koutentakis said that Greece has no cash problem at the moment, but added that “if we ever come to a dilemma between the payment of pensions and the repayment of the debt, we will pay the pensions.”
There is a dispute between the IMF and Athens over the 2015 primary deficit. Koutentakis said the Fund estimates that 2015 closed with a primary deficit of 0.6 percent of GDP, while official data from Greece’s finance ministry point to a primary surplus of at least 0.2 percent. The actual figures will be released on April 21 by EUROSTAT.
“They (the IMF) dispute our figures without even explaining to us how they calculate theirs,” Koutentakis lashed out, arguing that “they are full of inaccuracies.”
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