Greece has said it will 'immediately' sell stakes in telecoms giant OTE, the main ports of Piraeus and Thessaloniki and state-owned Hellenic Postbank to help reduce its huge debt.
'The cabinet decided to immediately proceed with the sale of stakes in OTE, the Postbank, the Athens and Thessaloniki ports and the Thessaloniki water company in order to frontload its ambitious privatisation programme,' Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou said in a statement.
'To accelerate the process, the creation of a sovereign wealth fund composed of privatisation and real estate assets was also decided,' he said.
The Greek government has been forced to redraft its privatisation strategy as the country's economic impasse becomes increasingly apparent.
It had originally aimed to raise just €7 billion by 2013 and some of the sales, like that involving Hellenic Postbank, had been slated for later.
But Athens is now under pressure from its EU and IMF creditors, who rescued the country with a massive loan last year, to deliver results on pledged reforms in order to secure funds worth €12 billion.
Its accumulated debt has exploded to €340 billion, making most analysts doubt that it can keep up with repayments without extra aid when the EU-IMF loan runs out in 2013.
Uncertainty over Greece today undermined the euro and pushed the yield on 10-year Greek government bonds to a new high of over 17%, reflecting the unwillingness of investors to extend new loans to the debt-hit country.
Greece today also launched deep reforms of 136 service occupations, from bread-making to butchering, to end restrictive practices as the cabinet met to finalise measures to ward off a second debt crisis.
The EU and IMF had made the application of such measures a condition of the release in March of the fourth slice of rescue loans, in this case €15 billion.
An upcoming instalment worth €12 billion in May is now at stake.
A broad law to remove restrictive practices was passed three months ago, and today the finance ministry published a list of 136 professions and independent service activities which will no longer be protected by rafts of conditions, such as quotas and geographical limits.
The deregulation, which has already targeted lawyers, notaries and engineers, is designed to facilitate job creation at a time when over 780,000 people are out of work according to state statistics.
Press reports in Greece say that every ministry has dragged its feet in preparing lists and measures to enact following the enactment of the deregulation law in February.
Employers and trade federations have warned against deregulation of protected services and arrangements.
A recurrent problem in Greece has been that laws voted by parliament are not enacted and enforced.
