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Nearly 1.5 billion of the 44 billion euro aid tranche, which is expected to be granted to Greece on 13 December, will go to the one-off retirement payments of public workers. This became clear during the meeting of Deputy Minister of Finance Christos Staikouras and Minister of Employment Yiannis Vroutsis with the management of the public workers’ auxiliary fund. Another 62 million will be given to the public workers’ shareholding fund.

At the meeting it was decided to make the payments in full rather than gradually in instalments. The first to receive the money will be public workers who applied for retirement in 2010. At first, 1.13 billion euro will be allocated to the fund and the goal is to make between 3,500 and 4,000 one-off retirement payments each month.

The option of sending another 25 employees to the fund in order to accelerate the payment of benefits was additionally discussed. Most probably, they will work in the afternoon and on Saturdays to avoid delays and it is worth noting that such a proposal, but concerning instead the performance of their duties, would have caused a wave of strikes and protests.

The auxiliary fund of the employees of the Public Power Corporation DEI will receive 150 million euro. The financial position of the fund is so serious now that the waiting time is 30 months. About 3,400 employees of DEI are awaiting the one-off retirement payments.

33 million euro will be allocated to the auxiliary fund of the employees of the National Insurance Fund, where there are about 700 applications.

During last year, the one-off retirement payments for public workers and employees of the Public Power Corporation DEI were reduced by about 20% depending on the date of application for retirement. As a result of the cuts, the "loss" for public workers reached 23 thousand euro.

For the DEI employees, the reduction was from 25 to 30%. In numbers, this means that for an average one-off retirement payment of 85-90 thousand euro, those who retired in 2010 lost between 24 and 26 thousand euro and those, who retired in 2011 and 2012 lost between 28 and 30 thousand euro. For example, an employee with a salary of 3 thousand euro and 30 years experience, who retired in 2011, will get 59,544 instead of 90 thousand euro.

At the same time, an increasing number of the "blessed" employees of the Greek parliament are applying for retirement. Their goal is to anticipate the implementation of the recent government decision to align them with the ministerial employees and to cut the double retirement payment to which they have been entitled so far.

According to an article in To Vima newspaper, the number of those willing to retire is 165 from a total of 1,270 employees. Pensions are expected to be reduced by about 20% from the beginning of 2013 and it is possible that the number of applications for retirement may increase dramatically over the next week, which is the formal deadline for the submission of the second and final application.

Parliamentary sources claim that half of them are determined to retire and have even completed the appropriate procedures. In parallel, however, a significant number of departures from various departments in parliament have been reported. Indicative is the fact that three of the most important departments (Stenography and protocol, Human resources and Finance) have remained without heads and supervisors. Many departments will remain without heads and even without employees. An example of this is the printing house at the parliament, as six of its employees will retire by the end of the year.

The chairman of the National Assembly, Evangelos Meimarakis, has ordered mergers between parliamentary offices and redeployment of employees including those who receive salaries but never go to work, in order for the National Assembly to continue to function smoothly.