Costas Karamanlis, the Greek prime minister, is this week set to approve the €2.5bn ($3.9bn, £2bn) sale of a strategic stake in OTE, the public telecoms operator, to Deutsche Telekom, which would also take over management.
The deal, which comes as the Greek economy shows signs of slowing after a decade of strong growth, would be the country’s most important privatisation to date.
It is seen as a test of the right-of-centre government’s commitment to attracting foreign direct investment and to modernising a corrupt and inefficient public sector.
Former senior OTE executives are due to appear before an Athens prosecutor this week in a probe linked to the billion-euro bribery scandal at Siemens, the German engineering group, one of the Greek operator’s leading equipment suppliers.
