Evangelos Venizelos, left, and Jutta Urpilainen, Greek and Finnish finance ministers, last month
The still-roiling dispute over Finland’s insistence on some sort of collateral to guarantee its portion of the new €109bn Greek bail-out only got slightly closer to resolution Friday, and more senior finance ministry officials – this time department deputies – will take up the issue Monday on yet another conference call.
As we reported last week, Friday’s teleconference mulled a proposal to broaden the collateral deal so that non-Finns can participate, and to have the Greek side put up non-cash assets instead of the current bilateral deal, which would have Athens put about €500m cash into a Finnish escrow account.
An official briefed on Friday’s call told Brussels Blog that a consensus appeared to be building around the non-cash plan, which would use Greek government shares in state-owned enterprises or “illiquid” real estate assets as collateral. But time is running short.
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