Venizelos needs 180 votes for the new loan contract

The Implementation Legislation has been voted for by the Members of the Committee of Financial Affairs and now the procedure dictates that Parliament vote on each article separately. The President of the Committee has separated the articles in two sections. Articles 1-26 include the Fund for the Sale Private Property and others. Articles 27-49 include the new tax and other relevant measures.

During his speech, the Minister of Finance left the door open for voting on a new loan contract with 180 votes next September, whilst he also tried to pacify the “partisans” of DEI by announcing that the stocks of the company for sale won't be released soon.

In a speech to the Committee, he implied that before he begins procedures for the DEI shares sale, “the 3rd energy pack” of a new legislation must be voted by Parliament, which will take some time. Mr.Venizelos has repeated that the sale of the DEI wont happen in 2011 (the Mid-Term plan has set 2012 as the year of the sale anyway), but unfortunately he didn’t manage to persuade Mr.Athanasiadis and other PASOK MPs who won't vote for any legislation that includes the sale of DEI.

Furthermore, the Minister mentioned that the new loan contract “is one of the elements of the second program and there will be others as well” and noted that “ both the 1st and 2nd loan contracts are not under article 28 and are not texts of international law. Therefore, the problems do not lie in the legal nature of the loan contracts. But the program in its entirety needs to be submitted to Parliament for a vote and all of us need to negotiate in order to get a consensus from most MPs in order to really to live up to our responsibilities. We need to negotiate the program and to support it in unity. 180 votes are not enough. All other parties need to be persuaded and assume their responsibilities towards the people.”

Finally, the Minister said that the implementation law was defined as an urgent law since all the political parties agreed, explaining that  “The country has promised that the Mid-Term plan and the implementation law will be voted on by the 30th of June so that the Eurogroup can be free to discuss the 5th installment”

Mr.Panagiotis Kouroublis appeared very poignant in his comments “ We are setting up new laws within the context of a brutal blackmail by the EU and I feel betrayed as a European citizen…How will we sell the Public Companies? No one has the right to sell out public property without first having reached normal selling prices. The easy solution is to cut wages and pensions, but the difficult one is to go against the 'big guns'. When will you announce the names of those that transferred their cash deposits to banks abroad?”

Mr.Andreas Makripidis explained that the sale should be conducted “with a logic of growth, not just of getting cash because then we will be accused of selling out”, whilst clarifying that he disagrees with the line of thought that increasing taxes will bring more cash to the State.

Mrs Vaso Papandreou said “we are expecting the government to act as a government of emergency and not to simply shrink the time frames of the meetings”. Mr.Geitonas, however, disagreed and said that those are the rules of the Parliament and not the government.

Mr.Nasos Alevras noted that valuable time has been lost and asked “not to reach the eleventh hour and act under pressure when there are lots of technical details that take time”.