Mon, May 25, 2015 page15

• Greece to skip IMF repayment: minister

  GRINDING TOWARD ‘GREXIT’? Greece and its creditors were continuing talks in the so-called Brussels Group to speed progress on debt payments, an official said

  • Bloomberg
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  Greece will not make a debt repayment to the IMF due next month, as it does not have the money, Minister of the Interior and Administrative Reconstruction Nikos Voutsis said on Sunday.

  “The four installments for the IMF in June are 1.6 billion euros [US$1.8 billion]; this money will not be given and is not there to be given,” Voutsis told Greek Mega TV’s weekend show.

  Shut out of bond markets and with bailout aid locked, Athens has been scraping state coffers to meet debt obligations and to pay wages and pensions.

  Earlier, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said Greece cannot absorb more austerity and creditors must compromise to break the impasse over the release of funds for Athen’s cash-strapped economy.

  Tsipras earlier sought to placate critics within his SYRIZA party after returning from an EU summit in Riga, Latvia, where talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Francois Hollande failed to yield a breakthrough on measures to unlock bailout funding. Some members of his party advocate defaulting on loans rather than backing down from the anti-austerity policies that swept it to power in January, even if that leads the country out of the eurozone.

  “We have shown willingness to compromise to get to a mutually beneficial solution,” Tsipras said in a speech at the start of a two-day meeting of SYRIZA’s central committee on Saturday. “[However,] we ask from our partners the same respect, and to also make concessions.”

  A Greek exit from the euro is just a matter of time and would not lead to the breakup of monetary union, former US Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan told Het Financieele Dagblad in an interview published on Saturday.

  An exit could make the euro stronger, billionaire investor Warren Buffett said in an interview in the Euro-am-Sonntag newspaper.

  German Minister of Finance Wolfgang Schaeuble mentioned the possibility that Greece might need a parallel currency alongside the euro, if the nation’s talks with creditors fail, according to two people who attended a recent meeting, who added that he did not endorse the idea.

  The German Ministry of Finance on Friday called the account of Schaeuble’s remarks “inaccurate.”

  Negotiators from Greece and its creditors are continuing technical talks in the so-called Brussels Group “over the coming days in order to accelerate progress,” European Commission spokeswoman Mina Andreeva said on Friday.

  Eurozone finance officials, known as the Euro Working Group, are to hold a teleconference on Thursday to discuss Greece, two people familiar with the matter said, asking not to be named in line with policy.

  Before then, the European Central Bank’s Governing Council is to hold its weekly review of emergency liquidity support to the nation’s lenders.

  Pensions, sales-tax rates and targets for a primary budget surplus are among the open issues remaining between Greece and its creditors, a Greek government official told reporters after the meeting between Tsipras, Merkel and Hollande.

  A main obstacle is that the IMF needs to be on board, he said.

  “I know that there is a lot of work to be done, that the parties are now working,” IMF managing director Christine Lagarde said on Friday in Brazil. “It has to be a comprehensive approach and, as I said in other places, it cannot be a quick and dirty job. The IMF is not known for doing that, nor are the other partners in the negotiations.”

  Failure to reach a deal quickly would create immediate hardship for Greece, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told Tsipras in a telephone call on Friday, according to an e-mail from the US Treasury.
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