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Athens - Greece is to receive a vital €14.5bn loan instalment from the European Union "at the last minute" before a maturing debt payment this week, press reports said on Monday.
Top-selling Ta Nea daily noted that the money, part of a giant rescue package worth €110bn from the EU and the IMF, will arrive just in time to cover a €9bn Greek payment on Wednesday.
"The first instalment from the European Union will arrive by Tuesday, at the last minute before the maturing debt payment," the daily said.
The finance ministry declined to comment on Monday.
Greece drew the first funds from the package last Wednesday, getting €5.5bn from the International Monetary Fund.
The next tranche of funds from the IMF and the EU will arrive in August, the newspaper said.
Athens is paying a painful price for the unprecedented bailout - the first involving IMF aid to a member of the eurozone - with the government forced to slash civil servants' pay and pensions while raising taxes.
It is battling to avert default whilst snared in a deepening recession and is trying to rein in a public deficit of over €30bn to prevent a debt mountain of nearly €300bn euros from growing even higher.
The austerity programme has put the government on a collision course with unions who have so far staged three general strikes in protest and are holding a fourth on Thursday.
A poll published Sunday in the Ethnos newspaper found that most Greeks, 58.8 percent, think their country will be able to steer clear of bankruptcy, while 36.6 percent considered default inevitable.
While 56.2% of the 1 028 people polled by the Marc SA institute considered the austerity measures to be necessary, 87.8% judged them to be unfair.
IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn said Sunday that European nations took too long to respond to the Greek crisis.
"I am convinced that if the problem had been managed in February, the cost would have been less high. But it took too long," Strauss-Kahn told same newspaper.
- AFP
