BRICS Bank Could Be Alternative To Funding from European Creditors, Says Greek Minister

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Greece’s Alternate Minister for Social Insurance, Dimitris Stratoulis, said in an interview Wednesday with Greece’s Real FM radio, that the country could join the BRICS’ New Development Bank as a source of funding, an alternative to “humiliation” by EU-dictated austerity. He said:

“Greece has alternative options for liquidity and funding…If we need to ask for funding with favorable terms, without [the Troika’s] Memoranda and unconditional subordination of our country, and they lend us money as a normal country, why should we rule it out? This is an option that is also on the table,”

Athens-Macedonia Press Agency quoted him as saying.

Stratoulis said the government cannot make an agreement with the European creditors that compromises the government’s principal commitments.

“Cancelling the backbone of your policy statements, such an agreement cannot and will not be reached…Some days are left to negotiate and ensure an agreement that does not lead us into humiliating submission, but will open promising paths,– at least it will offer some positive way out for the people and the country.”

In a follow-up to Russian Deputy Finance Minister and representative of the BRICS bank Sergey Storchak’s May 11 invitation to Greece to join the bank, Storchak replied to a press question that Greece’s joining the bank will not be discussed until the BRICS July 8-9 summit in Ufa, Russia. Repeating what he had said in his groundbreaking interview with Athens-Macedonia News Agency, when he had first mooted Greece’s joining the BRICS bank, Storchak said, “In accordance with the charter, the New Development Bank is open to any sovereign member of the United Nations Organization.”

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