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Greece 'to miss its budget targets' despite bail-out deal

Greece is already off course and is likely to miss the budget targets attached to the €130 billion (£108 billion) bail-out programme, officials have warned.

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Greece is already off course and is likely to miss the budget targets attached to the €130 billion (£108 billion) bail-out programme, officials have warned.

Athens has probably cut spending enough to bring its primary deficit down to 1.5% this year as agreed. But "current projections reveal large fiscal gaps in 2013-14", according to a leaked draft report by the European Union (EU), the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In its report, the troika said Athens will have to impose further fiscal cuts of as much as 5.5% of GDP to meet next year's targets.

The report says that "substantial additional expenditure cuts will have to be announced and adopted by Greece in the coming months, in particular when Greece updates its medium-term budget in May 2012".

"The recovery previously announced for next year will be further delayed with, at best, a stagnation of activity in 2013," the report said.

Even so, the report, called The Second Economic Adjustment Programme for Greece, paves the way for Greece to receive the first tranche of its new bail-out in the next few days. Athens needs the cash injection to repay a €14.5 billion bond due on March 20.

However the troika report threatens a repeat of the lurches markets have suffered in the run-up to each disbursement of Greece's €110 billion first bail-out.

The troika report said that Greece is to receive a total of €144.7 billion from the European Financial Stability Facility between 2012 and 2014 while the IMF will contribute an extra €28 billion over four years.

The total is thought to include the unpaid rump of the first bail-out - around €40 billion - even though the programme was abandoned because Athens could not meet the financial conditions attached to it.

In a rare piece of good news for Athens, Fitch upgraded Greece to B-/Stable from Restricted Default following last week's €206 billion debt restructuring and the agreement by finance ministers in Brussels this week to approve the bail-out.

On the second day of the summit, the group of 17 finance ministers returned to their plans for a Financial Transactions Tax (FTT). The controversial tax, which would impose a small levy on all bank transactions, is strongly opposed by Britain.

Meanwhile, Italy raised €12 billion on the bond markets at sharply lower rates. Traders, relieved by the progress on the debt crisis and encouraged by good economic data in America and Germany, pushed European stocks to a seven-month high. The Stoxx Europe 600 index closed 1.8% higher; the German Dax rose 1.4%; and the FTSE 100 was up 1.1%.

But Jens Weidmann, president of the Bundesbank, again criticised the ECB's recent efforts to support European banks by offering billions of €of cheap loans. Mr Weidmann said he didn't mean "all crisis measures must be immediately withdrawn", but he insisted the ECB needed to "organise and implement an exit strategy" from its exposure to eurozone debt.

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