[LINK] "Eurogroup chief suggests East German privatization model for Greece"

[rfmcdonald]

Given everything I know about how the mass privatizations in East Germany left East Germans feeling systematically disenfranchised, Juncker's suggestion strikes me as potentially politically catastrophic.

Greece should establish a trust agency tasked with selling off state assets modeled after the organization that privatized former East Germany's public property, according to the Eurogroup President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Juncker said the trust agency would be staffed by international experts in order to lend it a degree of independence.

"I would welcome it very much if our Greek friends found a privatization agency independent of the government and modeled after Germany's Treuhandanstalt," Juncker told the German news magazine Der Spiegel, referring to the agency which privatized thousands of state-owned companies after the collapse of communist East Germany and national reunification.

Juncker said Europe would carefully guide Athens as it seeks to generate revenue by selling off assets.

"Henceforth, the European Union will escort Greece's privatization program as if we were conducting it ourselves," he said.