Here are excerpts from his interview, including details on privatisation plans and outlook for the economy.
TOP RISKS
"On the fiscal side one of the biggest worries is the expenditure outside the
central government. However, from the beginning of the year we have already in operation a new budget IT system, which follows on a daily basis central government expenditures by budget code.
"This is being extended to the general government and together with the requirements for the dissemination of information that we have ... this gives us assurances that we will have closer control.
"Obviously, revenues, especially from cracking down on tax evasion, are an important element as well as are to make sure that the recession doesn't hurt revenues as much as it did last year.
"On the structural reform side, we have a very complete and complicated programme, very heavy and compressed in time. It stretches the capacity of the public administration to implement it. The concern is to keep up the pace of the implementation.
AUSTERITY VS GROWTH?
"You cannot command growth, you cannot push a button and create growth. There would be an alternative if Greece was able to keep access to international markets. To the extent that it cannot the only way to move forward is to have a drastic deficit reduction programme.
"This entails of course some loss in economic activity in the short term. But this is the fastest way to bring back confidence, therefore investments, therefore growth. In fact, our policies represent a shortcut to get growth going.
ECONOMY
"We see the external sector picking up more or being more of a growth driver than it was in the past. And we are seeing some hopeful signs already of exports picking up October figures just released for example, show a 25 percent increase in exports.
"We are beginning to see a change in economic sentiment. It's by no means a huge change at the moment but we are seeing the bottom of it. So the sentiment is beginning to move and it is going to be driven by mostly exports, some resumption in investment ... and we are hoping that private consumption will start recovering after mid-2011.
"The pace of recovery will depend also on what is going on in the rest of the euro zone.
PRIVATISATIONS
"One of the first things that are coming up is the extension of the concession of the Athens International Airport (AIA) and as a next move changing the stake in the shareholding of the airport.
"Following that we have the regional airports and we are in a process of hiring advisers, creating corporate entities out of them and then finding strategic investors.
"We have the entire gaming and betting complex where the new legal framework will be passed into law by February... There is a range from water to ports, to electricity, to DEPA (gas company), to the post office to name just a few.
"We will be using a very flexible methodology. We will ask financial advisers to scope out the interest ... in certain areas we want to maintain public control in the infrastructure itself but we want to attract strategic investors including management in certain cases and outright sales in others.
PROPERTIES PLANNED TO BE SOLD
"What we have announced already is a spade of roughly 12 properties that we are frontloading, because they are the most mature, outright sales or long-term leases because those are the alternatives.
"Among these is of course the mega project of Hellenikon (former Athens airport site), where we are creating a company to handle its development and hiring advisers to do so.
FIGHT TAX EVASION
"We finished the year well with an overall increase in revenues, around 5.5 percent compared with last year, very close to our target. This has been helped also by tax settlement which produced overall 2 billion euros, of which 1 billion this year and another billion is going to be paid next year.
"We have seen increased compliance by enterprises in their VAT returns even though retail trade has been falling.
"We are reasonably satisfied with the progress by the tax police, however we are about to unveil in January an action plan against tax evasion and the legal element of which will be included in the tax bill that will pass in February.
"It will bring tax evasion closer to a criminal offence and will make jail sentences easier for tax offenders. It will include a new, faster mechanism to settle tax disputes, which will help a lot in reducing time between penalties and actual payment. It will include a new method for assessing and replacing, if necessary, tax officials.
Reuters
(Reporting by Dina Kyriakidou and Lefteris Papadimas)
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE70318W20110104?pageNumber=1
