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‘Confident’ of Debt Deal, Loan Support: Greece

Dissenters in Tsipras’s left-wing Syriza party, who want to end bailout talks and return to a national currency, promised to fight the deal, describing it as a “noose around the neck of the Greek people”.

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Greece must repay some $3.79 billion to the European Central Bank by next Thursday.

A Finance Ministry spokesman said Berlin was not rejecting the bailout plan for Athens and that the ministry had simply raised questions about the MoU.

Amid arguments about how authority over this fund would be shared by the Greek government and EU institutions, the negotiators agreed on a task force to sort out the issue by December.

The deal reportedly phases out early retirement and brings in a gradual rise of the pension age to 67 by 2022.

Breidthardt declined to comment on any details of the agreement, but the newspaper Kathimerini published on Tuesday morning what it said was a list of requirements from Greece’s creditors. “Agreement is a big word”. “Now as a next step, a political assessment will be made”, said European Commission spokeswoman Annika Breidhardt.

The telephone call came after Greece and its creditors reached a provisional agreement on a cash-for-reform programme on Tuesday to help Athens make a critical 3.2-billion-euro debt repayment to the European Central Bank by August 20.

Tsipras also spoke to Merkel, as well as European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker and French President Francois Hollande, on Monday.

Greece submitted the draft bill for a proposed third round of bailouts to its parliament Wednesday, aiming to vote on the measure before a meeting with eurozone finance ministers on Friday.

In Athens, Tsipras asked for the Parliament to be recalled from its summer recess for a vote on Thursday, but Parliament speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou said the planning would not be decided before Wednesday evening.

The agreement gives Greece some respite after a turbulent year marked by acrimonious talks with lenders, the imposition of capital controls and a three-week shutdown of its banks before Athens capitulated last month to creditors’ demands for deep austerity measures in order to receive new loans.

Greece has been in financial turmoil for more than five years and has already received two earlier bailouts.

A few technical details on measures – such as a law governing individual bankruptcies – that Greece must pass before getting aid were still being discussed between technical experts from both sides, another Greek official said.

In 2016 the primary surplus, the balance not including debt service, will be 0.5 percent, followed by 1.75 percent in 2017 and 3.5 percent in 2018, the source added.

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The leftist Syriza government has also agreed to a new round of privatization, which will include the sale of some of Greece’s key ports.

A European Union flag flutters outside the Athens Stock Exchange