The head of the European Investment Bank (EIB) said it would take Greece decades to recover from its financial crisis and criticized the efforts of European politicians, in comments published Thursday.
"The recovery process (in Greece) will take one to two decades," Werner Hoyer told the daily Berliner Zeitung, dpa reported.
The former parliamentarian for Germany's Free Democratic Party, who has headed the EIB for a year, also criticized politicians for their lack of courage at the last European Union summit in December, saying they had failed to bring Europe "forward politically."
"We have the ESM rescue fund, and ECB chief Mario Draghi has bought us time with his bond-buying programme which the politicians now have to use," he said.