The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has just been presented with a request for assistance from Greece. Until now, the IMF provided only technical assistance to Athens. The team of experts is hard at work in the capital of Greece. "We are ready to act quickly in response to this demand," said Dominique Strauss-Kahn Friday, IMF Managing Director. And Youssef Boutros-Ghali, chairman of the board of the institution, recalled: "Aid to Greece will take time. This can not happen from one day to another. "Especially since the Papandreou government is engaged in negotiations on a plan" covering several years. "
So far, the IMF had not been involved in developing the plan of the European Union. This is not a member of the board of the fund. The proposals could therefore engage the IMF, said it does in Washington.It is expected to "several weeks" of negotiations. The amount of the full plan could exceed the record $ 58 billion set by Korea in 1997 with the conditions negotiated by the IMF.
The multilateral institution also assumed that the share of aid to Greece will represent one third of the package agreed by the other countries of the euro area. But this figure could possibly change after the verdict of the negotiators of the fund. The absence of a margin for adjustment by devaluation, however, seriously complicates the terms that the IMF should negotiate with the Greek authorities.This is not entirely without precedent: for example, Latvia has received 1.7 billion euros from the IMF in 2008, as part of an international package of 7.5 billion, while keeping its currency indexed euro.
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