Ladies and Gentlemen, dear friends,
I would like to thank each and every one of you for accepting our invite and attending today's meeting and update.
It is a special privilege for me to be joining you in Thessaloniki, the city all Greeks are natural-born citizens of and, literally, home to many of us.
We undertook this initiative to have this event today so as to encourage responsible public dialogue and to acquaint you with recent developments concerning social allowances and payment thereof, to formally register your concerns and worries but also exhaust every possibility to improve terms and conditions for reinstating the said social benefit.
Bringing back that allowance which was unfairly abolished, was part of our pre-electoral commitments and we eventually strove for that. It is, after all, a political battle you have also fought yourselves; we did so together.
We insisted on doing so since we believe it is the historical duty of the motherland who ought to do justice to that part of Hellenism that was wronged. We fought to that end and as you know the outcome of this struggle, following tough negotiations, was Art. 93 of Law 4387/2016 on Social Security.
The two circulars (one for the Ministry of Labour and the one on the Organisation of Agricultural Insurance) are trying, within the confines of a tight fiscal framework, to determine a procedure aimed at, also, anchoring legislative and administrative practices so that they stay and become acquis.
We realise and fully understand potential problems and we are already endeavouring to solve such problems from both a political and a organisational point of view. We wish to, nonetheless, lend an ear to what you have to say, so that, as I said before, we may fully capitalise on scope there is to improve certain parameters.
Dear Friends, ladies gentlemen,
We have restored communication with all bodies representing Hellenism, with which we are in very good terms, there is understanding and we work together to find solutions to issues such as the translation of the names of our diaspora.
At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs we secured aid that is to be granted to students of Greek origin in the form of scholarships. We managed to do so after quite a number of years (for the first time since 2009), while trying to exhaust scope there is for all the children of the Greek national minority in Albania who have filed for scholarship to be able to get one scholarship each, and indeed this is the year when all such applications were accepted.
Dear friends,
I would like to think that today's meeting is improving our cooperation and can enhance it anew.
As far as the Ministry and the General Secretariat are concerned, rest assured we are making every possible effort to that end.
September 9, 2016