Culture Minister Aristeidis Baltas met with members of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF) to discuss the reinstatement of funding for Greece’s National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) that was on the line.

The Ministry of Culture state that the decision to withdraw a grant of three million euros from the SNF was purely for accounting purposes so as to close the annual calculations for 2015 after the museum failed to meet deadlines in the conditions set for the disbursement of the grant.

The museum had failed to meet the agreed deadlines for the grant that had been agreed 19 months earlier, however in his meeting with EMST Director Katerina Koskina, SNF Board of Directors President George Papathanasiou and others, Baltas managed to put all the demands of the EMST back on track so that the donation’s time charts can be met. In his announcement, Baltas said that he held a series of meetings with the museum’s management in the last month and had set in motion all of the EMST’s demands, such as paying for the cost of moving the museum to new premises, paying 420,000 euros to the museum from the regular budget, securing a further 2.0 million euros from the Public Investments Programme, getting approval for the hiring of staff and “moving to the final stages the issue of a presidential decree on the EMST internal operating procedures.”