Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos on Tuesday again pressed Athens’ position for debt relief this year, in addressing a relevant Parliament committee where the 2017 draft budget was submitted a day earlier.
Tsakalotos, an avowedly left-leaning economics professor in the UK before taking up Greek politics over the past few years, nevertheless used a free market paradigm to boost his case for Greek debt relief.
He told members of the Parliament committee that investors looking at Greece want to know that the country will easily service its debt over the next 10 years.
“This is significant for us. If a political decision is taken to kick the can down the road for another one or two years, then an investors will wait two years to make his decision,” Tsakalotos said.
He also noted that Athens was in the “initial stages of how to make the Greek debt sustainable within the Eurozone framework”.
The mild-mannered Tsakalotos’ statement comes less than a month after government Deputy PM, Yannis Dragasakis, an LSE-educated veteran leftist lawmaker in the country, estimated that debt relief will begin after 2018, while linking the Greece portion with the overall European debt.
