Hundreds of freight trucks lined key roads out of Athens yesterday after truckers began a strike protesting government plans to liberalise their sector and help revive the recession-hit Greek economy.

Amid fears of fresh fuel shortages motorists formed long queues at petrol stations as a similar week-long protest in July nearly starved the country of fuel.

Protesters parked hundreds of trucks on hard shoulders at Athens motorway exits to northern Greece and the southwestern Peloponnese peninsula but did not block traffic, an AFP photographer said.

As truckers’ representatives discussed further steps, police warned that they would stop a planned protest convoy from entering central Athens.

Government spokesman George Petalotis also issued a terse warning.

“Whoever thinks that these actions can go on does not know the law and does not seem to realise that the government will resolutely protect the public good,” he said on television.

To avoid price gouging of motorists the development ministry imposed a maximum price for unleaded petrol at €1.47 a litre for a seven-day period.

The Socialist government wants to open the freight market to full competition within three years to cut transport costs which traders say inordinately push up the price of many goods.

No new freight licences have been issued in Greece for years, meaning that would-be operators can only purchase existing permits at high cost.

The truckers complain that inviting competition into the freight sector by reducing new licence charges is unfair to existing operators who have already paid high start-up fees running up to €300,000.

Greece has suffered waves of strikes and protests over unprecedented budget cuts and reforms the government had to agree to in order to tap a huge bailout loan from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund earlier this year to stave off bankruptcy.

On Saturday, 20,000 people marched against the austerity drive in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city, hours before Prime Minister George Papandreou defended the measures in a key speech.

Greece is under close scrutiny from its EU-IMF creditors and the release of loan funds is conditional on the application of the reforms.

Mr Papandreou said yesterday that he sympathised with the demonstrators and might have been one of them, if he was “just a citizen”.

“Of course we don’t want violence and we need ... to keep this dialogue going so that people feel that we’re working together to solve this problem,” he added, speaking during an Oslo conference hosted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and International Labour Organisation.

“It’s true to say that the people being hit by the crisis and even more being hit by the measures that the governments have to take... are not directly responsible for that mess,” said IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, also speaking from Oslo.

“But you need to fix the problem,” he added.

A joint mission from the European Union, the European Central Bank and the IMF was yesterday beginning a new audit of Greek finances that will determine whether a nine-billion-euro loan instalment will be disbursed in December.

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