Greece's membership of the eurozone is not in doubt despite a damaging review of its budget data stretching back five years, a European Commission official said Monday.
"The view of the commission's legal service is that there isn't the possibility to return to the subject of Greece's adhesion to the eurozone," commission spokesman Gerassimos Thomas told reporters.
He said the decision to admit Greece to the eurozone in 2001 was based on the data and agreed methodology in use at the time and could not now be reviewed.
Greece's conservative government, which took office in March, admitted Monday that the country's public deficit has been in excess of the eurozone limit -- 3.0 percent of economic output -- all the way back to 1999.
According to several Greek press reports Monday, EU data agency Eurostat found after a major reappraisal that Greece's deficit for 1999 was 3.38 percent of gross domestic product.
The Eurostat findings were to be presented by EU economic commissioner Joaquin Almunia to a meeting of eurozone finance ministers in Brussels Monday evening.
But Thomas, Almunia's spokesman, said that any talk of EU sanctions against Greece was premature.
"No decision has yet been taken at this stage," he said.
The matter would need to be discussed further by the European Commission and the finance ministers, he said.
Greece has already incurred the EU executive's ire for letting its public deficit surpass the 3.0 percent limit. Recent revisions have shown the scale of the problem to be much worse than previously thought over 1999-2003.
By: N. Peter Kramer
