Greece on Monday announced early repayment of some of its debt to European countries dating back to the 2010 financial crisis.
Government spokesman Pavlos Marinakis told reporters that the country would repay 6.9 billion euros ($8.13 billion) of loans next month.
The finance ministry has estimated that the early repayment would cut public sector debt to about 130 percent of GDP next year, he added.
Greece has projected debt to be 137 percent of GDP this year.
The head of the Public Debt Management Agency, Dimitrios Tsakonas, last Friday said that Greece would no longer have the highest debt in Europe at the end of this year.
Italy would instead owe the most, he added.
At an economic conference in Athens, Tsakonas set out how Greek debt would evolve in the coming years, predicting it would fall to 113 to 115 percent of GDP.
That would put Greece “in fourth or even fifth place among the most heavily indebted countries, behind France, Belgium and Italy”, financial daily Naftemporiki quoted him as saying.
Greece endured eight years of austerity under three successive international bailouts worth a total of 289 billion euros to avoid collapsing under the weight of debts totalling some 300 billion euros.
But it is currently posting one of the highest growth rates in the eurozone and according to government projections, the economy is forecast to grow at a rate of two percent this year.
But inflation has soared to 5.4 percent year on year in part due to the war in the Middle East, creating a headache for Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s conservative administration.
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