The eurozone approved a four month extension on Greece’s bailout Saturday morning (AEDT), provided Athens submits by Monday details on the reform and budgetary measures it plans to take, Austria’s finance minister Hans Jörg Schelling said.
The four month extension falls short of the six months Greece had requested Thursday and strengthens the hand of the country’s creditors in negotiations for a follow-up deal.
Greece has to submit a list of proposed measures by Monday, which will then assessed by by the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund by April, Mr Schelling said.
Finance ministers will hold conference call Tuesday night to discuss the Greek list of measures.
“This is not about winners and losers,” Mr Schelling said.
A four-month extension would get Greece past loan repayments to the IMF this spring, but would cut off ahead of almost €7 billion in bonds held by the ECB coming due in July and August. The shorter extension would thus strengthen the negotiation position of Athens’s creditors for any follow-up aid deal.
Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who presides over the talks among his eurozone counterparts, said earlier Friday he had been ferrying between talks with the “key players” at the Brussels meeting, but stressed that the situation remained “very difficult.”
Greece on Thursday asked for a six-month extension to its €240bn ($A350bn) rescue deal from the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund to prolong a loan program that expires at the end of the month. It was a step the new left-wing government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who soared to election victory on a promise to scrap the deeply unpopular agreement and some of its tough austerity measures, had resisted for weeks.
Without this extension — and a €7.2bn aid installment that has been held up since September — the government in Athens risks running out of money within weeks, Greek officials have warned. That would leave it unable to finance public services and repay big loans slices to the IMF in the spring.
As he arrived for the meeting with his eurozone counterparts in Brussels, Greek Finance Ministers Yanis Varoufakis said that with the request, his government had taken a big step toward meeting the demands of its creditors and that it was now time for the other side to budge.
“The Greek government has gone not the extra mile, [but] the extra 10 miles,” Mr Varoufakis said. “Now we are expecting our partners to meet us not half way, but one-fifth of the way.”
Athens has been at odds with other countries, particularly Germany, which rejected the letter as far too vague. Several ministers complained that Greece’s proposal lacked detail on what measures mandated by its existing bailout program it is prepared to implement and what it was planning to offer in return for those it rejects.
Mr Tsipras has ruled out further reductions to pensions for the poorest retirees and promised to reverse cuts to the minimum wage, arguing that maintaining the current course would plunge his country even further into crisis.
Greece has frustrated some ministers with what they say are mixed messages and brash claims about the way the existing bailout has worked. Several leaks of confidential documents to the press — sometimes before all ministers had even seen them — have also ruffled feathers.
Valdis Dombrovskis, a vice president of the European Commission who is in charge of the euro, said that the “changing rhetoric of Greek authorities has created a certain erosion of trust.”
source:theaustralian.com
STUDIO 3 NEWCASTLE AUSTRALIA 