According to AMNA, the meeting focused on the restructuring of ministries and agencies and on the mobility scheme that will see some civil servants transferred to cover needs elsewhere and others placed on a gradual layoff programme.

“We ratified the relevant decisions,” Mitsotakis said, “in order for the country to keep its timelines and place on mobility 12,500 civil servants by the end of September.” He added that mobility is an obligation Greece has but will also lead to improved use of existing staff and added that in the first phase of the plan already carried out, all civil servants were transferred to services that were short-staffed.

Mitsotakis described the institution of mobility as a positive tool that will help to better exploit the potential of the public sector and not a memorandum obligation of Greece, protothema.gr writes.

The meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, was also attended by government Vice President and Foreign Minister Evangelos Venizelos and several ministers whose ministries’ restructuring was under review.

According to enet.gr, during the government meeting yesterday, a new list was finalised containing the names of 8,099 civil servants who will be placed in the mobility scheme by the end of next month.

Civil servants placed in the mobility scheme will be involuntarily transferred or paid 75% of their already-reduced salary for up to eight months and then fired if another position can’t be found for them. The decision brings the total number of public service employees to be placed on the scheme to 12,500.

The list draws on staff in all 17 ministries, with the largest number – the 3,000 members of the municipal police – coming from the interior ministry.

Last month, 4,401 civil service employees (2,114 teachers, 2,234 school guards and janitors and 53 staff from the administrative reform ministry) were informed that they were being transferred.

It represents the biggest move to transfer civil service staff in recent Greek history.

Should everything go according to plan, the March EUR 2.8 billion installment will be granted at the Euro Working Group in early April.

FinMin Yannis Stournaras appears certain that Greece will collect the following EUR 6 billion installment in the Eurogroup that is scheduled to take place in mid April in Ireland. A ministry official told journalists: “we will not return from Ireland without the installment”.

In order to approve the March installment, troika will have to approve the reforms in government structures, evaluations of staff and the mobility/redundancy programme of the Ministry of Administrative Reform, as well as the number of “necessary layoffs” by the end of 2014.

Finance Ministry will have also to come up with a solution as regards the emergency levy on real estate property, in order to convince the troika about the plan to introduce a uniform real estate property tax. Rumors suggest the new levy will be up to 20% less than the current one.

Earlier this month Greece’s international lenders left talks in Athens without a deal that would secure the next tranche of bailout loans for the country and would return in April.

The troika then said that Greece had made “significant progress” with economic reforms required to receive the funds but it added that “technical issues” still needed to be resolved.

The troika’s current review is to determine whether Greece should get the next 2.8bn-euro tranche of the bailout funds. Specifically, the troika is looking into whether Greece is making progress on a promise to reduce substantially the size of its civil service.

Greece’s coalition government has pledged to make 25,000 civil service lay-offs by 2014.

Greece has received more than EUR 200 billion in loans since May 2010.