Auctions

Greece on Wednesday successfully auctioned a three-month Treasury bill issue raising 1,137,50 million euros from the market.

The interest rate of the issue fell to 1.95 pct, significantly lower compared with the interest rate of 2.33 pct in the previous auction of same issue last month.

Greece sold 812.5 million euros of three-month T-bills on Wednesday to refinance maturing issues, the country's debt agency PDMA said.

The three-month paper was sold at a yield of 2.33 percent, down from 2.70 in a previous sale last month.

A new competition for private television licenses will award seven permits, the National Broadcasting Council (ESR) decided Thursday.

This year's expired debts to the state reached up to 4.75 billion euros in the first five months of the year, so the tax administration is resorting to confiscations, auctions and lawsuits. On a daily basis the authorities conduct an average of 730 confiscations of salaries, pensions and bank deposits.

After a long delay, the Greek state sector has finally realized just how much costs can be reduced by conducting competitions and auctions electronically.

The numbers that were announced at an event hosted by the Independent Authority for Public Contracts were spectacular.

The Digital Policy Ministry on Thursday submitted to Parliament a legislative amendment which paves the way for a new auction for private television licenses following last year's government competition that was revoked by a Greek court.

Athens Ledra hotel has passed into the hands of US real estate company Hines, according to reports. The cost of the investment was a little over 33 million euros and is the first major one in the Greek economy. The call to tender was the fifth and final one, as the previous four had been declared fruitless.

A bronze sold for $57.37 million in New York on May 15, setting a new auction record for Romanian-born sculptor Constantin Brancusi and fetching more than twice its lowest pre-sale estimate, Christie's said.

As auction powerhouses Christie's and Sotheby's gear up for their New York spring sales, hopes are high that a host of major works the likes of which have not hit the block for several seasons will reap strong, even record, prices.

Entrepreneurs with debts to the state and the banks will as of August 5 be able to apply to settle their arrears under the so-called extrajudicial mechanism, while according to the deputy governor of the Bank of Greece, Theodoros Mitrakos, online property auctions will be in full swing by late August.