New layoffs expected also in the narrow public sector

At the Economist conference, Finance minister Evangelos Venizelos said that there is an excessive amount of civil servants and the sector needs to be “unburdened” from its load. This way, the Greek minister gave a hint of his plans to follow, stating that within this week he will announce the exact changes he is planning to introduce to the broader public sector.

Venizelos stressed that the government will have introduced the uniform payroll by the beginning of October and underlined that “no employee should be feeling threatened”.

Regarding the 2011 recession rate he said it will be carved out at 5.5%, underlining that one of his 2012 priorities is to cut expenses and saying that “this is the time we should make historic decisions, because if we don’t make them now then we will need to do it later on and under much worse conditions”.

Once again, he gave the thumbs up to privatizations and agreed with the IMF representative Bob Traa on the fact that no further taxes can or should be implemented as it would be unfair to the public.

Translated by Lida Filippakis