GREECE’S new government is “radically opposed” to privatised energy and infrastructure, Energy and Environment Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis said yesterday.

Selling state-owned enterprises is one of the actions Greece has been told to take in order to raise funds and reduce debt in exchange for rescue loans from the eurozone and International Monetary Fund.

His declaration was a shot across the bows of Greece’s troika creditors just hours before talks with their representatives were due to begin last night.

“Honestly, I haven’t understood why, for some schools of thought, privatisations have become synonymous with reforms,” Mr Lafazanis told a conference in Athens.

“We are radically opposed to privatisation, particularly of the strategic sectors and businesses of our economy and primarily in the sector of infrastructure and energy.”

He argued that “neoliberal deregulation in the energy market, which occurred particularly during recent years with the insistence of the [European] Commission and the troika,” had prolonged and exacerbated Greece’s financial crisis and energy poverty in the country.

Mr Lafazanis has frequently stated his rejection of privatisation and he has abandoned the sell-off of the country’s power grid and power utility DEH since final binding bids had not yet been submitted.

The country wants diverse energy sources but does not wish to be dependent on large foreign powers.

“Greece is too small a country to remain a type of dependent ‘troikan’ economic protectorate … with the status of an energy banana republic,” he said.

Increasingly bitter exchanges between Athens and Berlin culminated in Germany’s rejection yesterday of any attempt to reopen the issue of compensation for the occupation of Greece during World War II.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras had raised the question of wartime reparations in a parliamentary debate on Tuesday, insisting that Greece had never been fully compensated by Germany.

German Finance Ministry spokesman Martin Jaeger retorted that, in Berlin’s view, the issue was resolved in a 1960 accord requiring Germany to pay 115 million old Deutschmarks to Greece.

Mr Jaeger charged that “backward-looking allegations don’t help in the context of the work we need to tackle with the Greeks.”