Good
evening everyone and welcome to the press conference. Today we welcomed
one new colleague, the new Latvian Finance Minister Dana
Reizniece-Ozolato. She presented herself the ambitions of the new
government in Latvia and we welcomed here, and wished her, of course,
all the best.
The
first topic on our agenda was Greece. We discussed the state of play,
in particular of course of the first review, what the next steps could
be. The outcome of that is that the mission chiefs will return to
Athens. I'm not sure when exactly, perhaps already tomorrow. There is
enough common ground, enough preparation has been done for their mission
to continue, hopefully to work towards a successful completion. We
realise that if we want to complete, fully comply to what has been
agreed this summer, more work will have to be done. So the first outcome
of the Eurogroup today is that the mission chiefs will return to
Athens, the second one is that we stressed that more work needs to be
done, more effort needs to be put in for that to be a good outcome.
There are still fiscal gaps to be filled and some of the reforms will
have to be deepened.
So
we called on both the institutions but specifically also on the Greek
government to deliver that extra effort. On their return, which of
course we don't know when that will be, we will have to take a political
decision which also concerns the issue of debt and debt management,
debt relief. As you know, we have a longstanding promise that if the
Greek government fulfils its commitments in the programme and delivers a
primary surplus, we will do what is necessary to make the annual debt
surplus manageable, and that today also in Eurogroup we have realised
and made explicit that that discussion is going to be on our table in
the near future. So we will seriously try to bring those work strands
together in the coming months. So that's where we are on Greece and work
will continue. We have a joint interest to do it as quickly as
possible.
Secondly,
we had a broad discussion on the success and the finalisation of the
Cypriot programme. Our Cypriot colleague had quite an interesting
presentation showing all the good results that have come from the
sometimes difficult measures and deep reforms that have taken place in
Cyprus. The programme now comes to an end at the end of this month. The
same will go for the IMF part of the programme that actually had a
different ending date, but will also come to an end at the end of March.
We have issued a statement on that. There is still one prior action
outstanding, but overall the Cypriot authorities have delivered a very
very good job. Cyprus can now fund itself and many of the fiscal,
financial and structural reforms undertaken have put Cyprus back on a
path of sustainable growth. And they are very determined to hold on to
that accomplishment and to tackle the remaining challenges. So, many
compliments to Cyprus on that achievement.
The
third item on our agenda, was the follow-up on the implementation of
draft budgetary plans and the commitments of the Eurogroup statements of
November and February. In February we discussed Portugal as you
remember. So perhaps I'll leave it mainly for Pierre to tell you more
about that. We have also put out a statement on that work.
Finally,
we discussed a couple of issues regarding the work of the Eurogroup. If
you remember last month we already discussed transparency and the
outcome of that was that we would, in advance, publish annotated agendas
and that has happened, in advance of the Eurogroup. And the publishing
of the summing up letter, also this has happened for the first time. I
hope you've all taken notice of that. To complement that work, we today
agreed on publishing documents, final documents after Eurogroup
meetings, unless there are well-founded objections coming from the
authors. Most of the time the Eurogroup itself is not the author or the
owner of the documents. It is sometimes the Commission, sometimes the
ESM, sometimes others, but the principle is that as much as possible and
as soon as possible these documents will be made public after our
meetings. Unless, as I said, there are well founded objections. So that
is an additional good step on transparency.
Then
we discussed the way we work on thematic discussions. We have had, I
guess now for a couple of years, regular thematic discussions in the
Eurogroup which focus mainly on structural reforms. The work method
there is to benchmark where different countries are, what work has been
done in countries or should be done, and then we give that a follow-up
by regularly looking at the progress being made. There was strong
support among the ministers on this method of benchmarking. We will
focus it very much, of course, on financial and economic subjects. We
will ask the Commission to maintain the high quality of work that they
have done for us so far. The quality of the analysis and the quality of
the data is of course important if you go into the process of
benchmarking. So we will continue this work method if I can use that
word, and make sure that we discuss all the euro area recommendations
that the Commission annually puts to us. So that was on the work we do
in the Eurogroup and will be doing.
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