State arrears payment is still lagging
The state paid 4.3 billion euros of its arrears to the private sector in the first eight months of the year, although the State General Accounting Office approved demands for the payment of arrears totaling 5.7 billion euros during the same period, according to the data presented on Wednesday by Alternate Finance Minister Christos Staikouras.
This means that the problems in the state mechanism are persisting, resulting in more woes for enterprises that were already suffering from a major lack of cash. Furthermore, while those arrears were being paid, additional debts were building up, amounting to 2 billion euros.
“Our main objective is for the state to try not to create a new generation of expired debts while responding to its obligations so as to increase the cash flow in the real economy, which is a necessary condition for the economy to rebound,” Staikouras acknowledged.
He added that in the year to end-August, the state has paid lump retirement sums for 18,342 retiring civil servants, 91 percent of the funding required by military social security entities, and 84 percent of the obligations of hospitals and the National Health System.
