The list of retired employees of pension age has reached 250,000 applications with a waiting period of up to five years for auxiliary benefits. Many applications are frozen as legislation is pending at a time when Greece’s international creditors are pushing for pension cuts.

The longest delays are for the 17 different supplementary pensions due to the complexity of legislation as well as – more importantly – the lack of money to be able to meet the demands of payments.

All up, there are 120,000 pensions from the Single Supplementary Insurance Fund (ETEA) with retired employments from the retail sector still unpaid from 2011, while 2014 pension applications have yet to be touched!

Back payments? Forget it!

The cash-strapped economy cannot deal with the accumulated sum of back-payments in light of the fact that people whose pensions are issued are now owed five years worth of sums.

Another problem is lump sum payments of public sector employees who have to wait four years before getting the money they are entitled to or longer bearing in mind that state coffers are now empty.

The official EU figures

Eurostat shows that Greece spends more in pensions than other EU members with 16.3% of its GDP going to pensions at a time when the EU average is 12%. For this reason pensions (not actually received in practice, but theoretically pending) need to be reduced and the retirement age needs to be lifted to 67.