Greece yesterday demanded “major concessions” from its creditors after Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accused them of looting the country after last-ditch talks to avert a calamitous default collapsed.
With the Athens stock market diving, Tsipras said Greece would “wait patiently” until its creditors — the IMF and the EU — become “more realistic.”
He lambasted the creditors for “political opportunism” in trying to force Athens to take an axe to its pension system, a concession the leftist anti-austerity government has steadfastly refused to make.
Photo: EPA
“One can only see a political purposefulness in the insistence of creditors on new cuts in pensions after five years of looting under the bailouts,” Tsipras told the newspaper Efimerida Ton Syntakton.
Athens immediately came under intense fire from its EU partners, with a German finance ministry spokesman saying “the ball is in Greece’s court” and French President Francois Hollande urging Athens not to “waste time.”
“This message is for Greece,” Hollande told reporters at the Paris Air Show. “It should not wait and should restart discussions with the institutions... Let’s not waste time.”
European Commission Vice-President Jyrki Katainen said: “A solution is possible but this depends on the Greek government... We continue to hope.”
Quoted by the Austrian daily Der Standard, Katainen said: “There is a lot of goodwill... You can always provide more liquidity but this is nothing without structural reforms.”
Greek officials on Sunday blamed the failure of the latest round of talks on the IMF, the country’s most hardline creditor.
“The demands of the creditors are irrational,” an irate Greek government source said.
The Athens Stock Exchange plunged 7.14 percent in early trade yesterday before recovering to a 4.68 percent drop at midday, with bank stocks especially hard hit.
“In light of Greece being unwilling or unable to make any concessions at all ... it remains doubtful that a solution to avoid a Greek default can be reached,” analyst Markus Huber at London brokerage Peregrine & Black said yesterday.
The talks have aimed to break a five-month standoff between Athens and its creditor overseers, who are demanding reforms in return for the final 7.2 billion euros (US$8.1 billion) of Greece’s 240 billion euro bailout. The bailout expires on June 30, and to meet that deadline, a reform deal must be resolved by a meeting in Luxembourg on Thursday of the eurozone’s 19 finance ministers, who control the bailout purse strings.
Also at the end of the month, Greece faces a huge 1.6 billion euro payment to the IMF with another 6.7 billion euros due to the European Central Bank next month and in August, which Greek officials have said the government cannot afford.
EU Vice President for the Euro and Social Dialogue yesterday said that in view of the “persistent uncertainty,” the EU had slashed its projection of Greece’s GDP growth for this year from 2.5 percent to 0.5 percent.
“Needless to say, all projections for Greece are subject to a particularly high degree of uncertainty since ... the agreement is still not reached,” he said at the start of Innovative Enterprise Week in Riga, Lativa.
However, in a rare statement on their position in the talks, the IMF took a conciliatory approach, writing in an official blog that a deal would require “difficult decisions by all sides” — including Greece’s European partners.
Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis told Germany’s Bild newspaper in an interview published yesterday that a deal was still possible.
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