Giorgos Zavvos

Greetings! Since the government isn’t producing much news for this column, except for Olgara, who popped up in court again yesterday with her signature black shades, “clarifying that she doesn’t make statements for the sake of her children”—who, if I’m not mistaken, are still babies, but anyway—I’ll move on to the PASOK-SYRIZA scene where things are more fun.

Twelve banks have expressed an interest in participating in the Third Entrepreneurship Fund (TEPIX III), a program of the Hellenic Development Bank (HDB), which will leverage around 2.4 billion euros in new loans to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and which starts after Easter, HDB Chief Executive Ismini Papakirillou announced on Thursday.

The landscape is changing for the hundreds of thousands of loans subject to a repayment moratorium since the start of the pandemic in Greece.

Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras on Monday stressed the need to seek and activate instruments such as a bad bank, as the so-called Hercules Asset Protection Scheme (HAPS) is considered insufficient, while he also recommended taking recourse to the credit line of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM).

IMN's 3rd Annual Investors' Conference on Greek & Cypriot Nonperforming Loans (NPLs), originally scheduled to take place in March of this year, has now been rescheduled for September 25, with the provisional list of speakers including Greece's Deputy Minister for Finance Giorgos Zavvos.

The government is considering a tax reduction for investors buying the bonds that will be issued in the context of the Hercules plan of securitizing nonperforming loans, Deputy Finance Minister Giorgos Zavvos has told Bloomberg.

The European Commission on Thursday approved the Greek state's "Hercules" plan to reduce local banks' bad loans by up to 30 billion euros, and Deputy Finance Minister Giorgos Zavvos called on the country's lenders to utilize the project, making the most of the favorable market climate that cuts the cost of state collateral.

The asset protection scheme for the reduction of the bad loans in banks' portfolios has been dubbed the "Hercules Project" by the government, according to the proposal submitted to the European Commission by Deputy Finance Minister Giorgos Zavvos last Friday.

Bad loans worth 30 billion euros are being prepared for transfer to the asset protection scheme (APS) that the Finance Ministry is creating.

This is twice the original amount provided for, a development that highlights the government's resolve to tackle the problem of banks' nonperforming exposures.