French President Emmanuel Macron urged European firms to step up their investments in Greece to help reduce the country’s growing reliance on non-European countries, notably China.

Addressing a round-table of Greek and French business leaders on Friday, Macron said Greece was “forced” to choose non-European investors “because the Europeans were not there.”

French enterprises, he said with certainty, would ramp up their investments in Greece, a country that’s spent much of the past decade hurtling from one crisis to the next and seen its economy shrink by a quarter and unemployment and poverty levels swell alarmingly.

“We want Korean, Chinese and American investments, these are very important,” he said. “But if there are no European investors, then we are forced to select non-European investors.”

A failure to respond, he said, would show that Europeans have “no faith in Europe.”

Source: greece.greekreporter.com