FinMin officials brief Parliament on obligatory loan to Germany during WWII
Finance Ministry officials on Thursday briefed the Parliament's interparliamentary committee on German reparations on the methods they are using to calculate the loan Greece was forced to give to Germany during World War II.
Coordinator of a special working group at the ministry Panagiotis Karakoussis and his deputy Vassilios Malesiotis explained the method the group is using to collect information on how to evaluate the extent of the loan. They said they converted the total amount the German troops received from the Bank of Greece during the country's occupation by the Nazis into 1941-value U.S. dollars because the dollar was the only relatively stable currency at the time.
The ministry's group said it will begin calculating the interest on the originally disbursed amount from January 1, 1945, with an interest rate based on the average return of the ten-year U.S. Treasury bill.
The two officials said the group had collected 45,000 documents from the Foreign ministry, 761 files from the General Accounting Office and 5,000 documents from the State Legal Council and briefed the parliamentary committee on the difficulties of the project. They estimated the final report will be ready by December 31, 2014 and will include an assessment of all the types of German reparations.
In response, the parliamentary committee members said they would not issue their report if they do not have the working group's report, including all material classified as confidential.
Δημοφιλείς Ειδήσεις
