TAIPED aims at takings of 6 billion euros by 2018

Greece aims to raise a total of 6 billion euros from privatizations by 2018, the head of its sell-off agency TAIPED said yesterday, making up for a revenue shortfall last year and hoping to overshoot its latest bailout target. Privatizations have been a major part of Greece’s three international bailouts since 2010, but political resistance and red tape have hurt revenues. Athens has raised just 4.4 billion euros so far and has repeatedly revised targets downward. The country raised 500 million euros from asset sales last year, missing its bailout target by about 2 billion euros, mainly due to delays in completing the lease of 14 airports to a consortium led by Germany’s Fraport. The 1.2-billion-euro lease of regional airports was completed this year. Along with the sale of a 67 percent stake in Thessaloniki Port and a first 345-million-euro tranche from the concession of the Elliniko plot, the lease will help Athens raise 2 billion euros in total this year, TAIPED’s chairwoman Lila Tsitsogiannopoulou told reporters. “Our aim is to have the financial closing of the transaction[for Elliniko] in December 2017,” she said. ber of officially unemployed people reached 1.04 million people. Hardest hit were young people aged 15 to 24, with their jobless rate dropping to 45.5 percent from 49.9 percent in April last year. The jobless rate hit a record high of 27.9 percent in September 2013. sheets of some EU member-states’ banks, seen as a problem for the whole bloc because of spillover risks. While NPLs dropped to 4.8 percent of all loans in the EU in the first quarter of 2017, they remained well above 40 percent in Greece and Cyprus, at 18.5 percent in Portugal and 14.8 percent in Italy, European Banking Authority data shows.