Intrakat Group’s vice-president of the Board of Directors and managing director Alexandros Exarchou warned against the possibility of the loss of resources of the Recovery and Resilience Fund (RRF) if there are no reforms for the major projects.
Exarchou was speaking in a panel of the conference “Infrastructure and Networks: The Greek Reality. Modernization, Resilience and Sustainable Development.”
RRF timelines are a given and if RRF projects cannot be tendered and awarded, then the country will lose significant financial resources. And one reason for this will be the failure to solve the problem of issuing letters of guarantee, Exarchou noted.
He pointed out that the issue of letters of guarantee is a “luxury” problem in relation to the past crisis, which left Greece with only 4 systemic banks.
Exarchou admitted that although Greek banks are making huge efforts to solve the problem, their internal regulations and the regulatory framework of the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) make it difficult to issue even a 6-million-euro guarantee letter. “I am afraid that the moment will come when it will be impossible to issue a letter of guarantee,” he warned and called for legislation that will deal with these pathologies of the past.
