Initiative to improve the out-of-court settlement scheme
Finance Minister Christos Staikouras on Wednesday announced in Parliament an immediate legislative initiative to improve the extrajudicial debt settlement mechanism, in response to a question by the head of the opposition PASOK-Movement for Change parliamentary group, Michalis Katrinis, about the “ever-increasing private debt.”
Staikouras noted that “we are improving the existing tool of the extrajudicial mechanism through a direct legislative initiative in the next few weeks so that – among other things – a) we oblige the justification of non-consent to the proposed settlement produced by the algorithm, both by the financial institutions as well as the debtors, and that this is publicly posted on the platform; b) we expand the scope of the extrajudicial mechanism, so that debtors with a single debt can also be included; c) we can include new categories of debts that can be settled, such as debts in favor of third parties collected by the tax administration; and d) we can abolish the penalty for prepayment of debts to the public sector but also reduce the interest rate for their settlement.”
