Athens : Greece has taken no final decision to issue a bond this week, the country's finance minister said yesterday after a Financial Times report that the country planned to launch a multi-billion euro bond issue in the coming days.
Greece wants to borrow about 5 billion euros (Dh24.5 billion), the FT said on Friday, citing the head of Greece's Public Debt Management Agency (PDMA), Petros Christodoulou.
"We would like to return to the market within March," the paper quoted Christodoulou as saying. Asked by Reuters to confirm or deny the report, Christodoulou refused to comment. Finance Minister George Papaconstantinou told Reuters: "There is no such decision."
Greece's next bond sale would be a first test of investors' mood after European Union leaders agreed on Thursday to throw a safety net around Greece, if it failed to fund its borrowing needs on the open market.
Greece must borrow some 16 billion euros by late May alone to refinance maturing debt. Christodoulou said on March 4, when Greece last raised 5 billion euros, that he planned to tap markets regularly, probably starting with two more syndications.
Investors have punished the country with skyrocketing borrowing costs since October, when it revealed that its deficit reached 12.7 per cent of GDP in 2009.
Prime Minister George Papandreou said on Friday he hoped that the EU-IMF deal would help Greek bond yield spreads fall from their current level of more than 300 basis points vis-a-vis comparable German bunds.
Many economists think that Greece's current borrowing levels are unsustainable for the country's finances and will derail Papandreou's efforts to slash the budget deficit.
