Lithuania seeks to join euro area in 2015: Eurogroup chief

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Lithuania is seeking to join the euro area from 2015, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, president of the Eurogroup, announced here on Monday.

"The Lithuanian authorities have also expressed their intention to adopt the euro on 1 January 2015," he told a press conference.

It is the country's second attempt to join the eurozone, which currently has 18 members, after an earlier bid failed for missing a target for inflation in 2006.

The European Commission (EC) and the European Central Bank (ECB) will publish their regular convergence report that will come out early June, Dijsselbloem said.

The Convergence Reports examine whether the Member States satisfy the necessary conditions to adopt the single currency. The EC Treaty requires the EC and the ECB to issue these reports at least once every two years or at the request of an EU Member State which would like to join the euro area.

Lithuania's Baltic neighbors Estonia joined the euro area in 2011 and Latvia joined this month.

Dijsselbloem said Latvia's recent transition to the euro had been a "smooth changeover" and that economic developments in the country were "encouraging."

The Eurogroup chief expressed regret that negotiations with Greece on the economic reforms the Greek government should implement to meet the terms of its bail-out had not progressed further.

Eurozone member states, together with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), granted the debt-stricken Greece a 240-billion-euro (about 328 billion U.S. dollars) bail-out, part of it in May 2010 and part of it in March 2012, in exchange for Greece's implementation of tough austerity policies and structural reforms.

"I am sorry to say that the review is not yet concluded," he said, urging further work to be done by Greece before the Troika -- a team from the European Commission, the ECB and the IMF assigned to monitor Greece's compliance with austerity reforms -- can return to Athens to complete its "review" of Greece's implementation of the conditions.

"We called on Greece and the Troika to do their utmost to conclude the negotiations as soon as possible," he said. "And on basis of a positively concluded review and only on that basis we will then come to that once again in the Eurogroup meeting."