Greece and its international creditors visit Athens on Tuesday 20 October in order to resume talks over reforms demanded from the Greek government as an exchange for the July bail out agreement.
The heads of the institutions' missions to Greece will stay in Greece for 2-3 days and will decide the agenda of prior actions and milestones to be legislated going forward.
The European Commission's Declan Costello, the IMF's Delia Velculescu and the European Central Bank' s Rasmus Ruefer will have preparatory contacts with leading government ministers and are expected to return to Greece in November or December at the latest for the formal review of Greece's economy.
This is the first visit of Greece's creditors since the snap vote on September 20; The negotiators were in Athens in late July, after Greece agreed with its creditors on a new loan in exchange for painful economic reforms.
Under the July deal, Athens agreed to more public spending cuts in return for a three-year, 86 billion euro ($96 billion) EU bailout — its third since 2010 — which prevented it crashing out of the Eurozone. Greece was given in August a first tranche of 13 billion euros to help it meet payments owed to the ECB and the IMF.
The next omnibus bill that the Greek government is going to discuss with its creditors includes painful measures such as pension reforms, “bad” loans, harsher austerity measures. Its approval by the Greek parliament will allow the disbursement of a 1 billion euro sub-tranche, the completion of the recapitalization of banks by the end of December in order to avoid a bail in and the beginning of the first review and an agreement on debt settlement.
Wednesday's Eurogroup Working Group is considered a milestone as it will prepare for the Eurogroup's November 9 meeting and will advise the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) on whether to give the green light for the disbursement of the sub-tranche of 2 billion euros by October 27.