16/2/2015
By Peter Spiegel
Eurozone finance ministers arriving in Brussels for high-stakes talks over Greece’s €172bn bailout said the chances of an agreement were remote and hinted they may need to return for another round of negotiations later in the week.
Greece’s rescue programme is due to expire on February 28, leaving Athens with no EU financial backstop.
Several eurozone ministers, including Wolfgang Schäuble, the influential German finance chief, said discussions between Athens and its international creditors at the weekend failed to close differences ahead of Monday’s meeting.
“What I have heard so far has not strengthened my optimism,” Mr Schäuble said. “As long as the Greek government doesn’t want a programme I don’t have to think about options.”
Earlier Mr Schäuble said Greece had been “behaving rather irresponsibly” over its talks with its eurozone creditors.
Rimantas Šadžius, Lithuania’s finance minister, said that even after days of technical talks between both sides, “there is still not sufficient clarity” on what the Greek government is proposing, and Peter Kazimir, his Slovak counterpart, predicted the ministers would have to return to Brussels in the coming days.
“The programme runs out for Greece at the end of February and I don’t know what their specific requests are,” said Michael Noonan, the Irish finance minister, reflecting the mood of many briefed on talks between the two sides. “So I would like it if the Greek finance minister were to put specific requests to the meeting today.”
Athens sounded determined ahead of the meeting not to cede to pressure from the eurozone to accept an extension to its bailout.
“We shall desist, whatever the consequences, from deals that are wrong for Greece and wrong for Europe,” Yanis Varoufakis, Greek finance minister, wrote in an article for The New York Times. “The ‘extend and pretend’ game that began after Greece’s public debt became unserviceable in 2010 will end.”
Pessimism about the talks sent the Athens stock market down 4.4 per cent on Monday. The yield on three-year Greek bonds, which move in the opposite direction to the price, jumped 126 basis points to 17.11 per cent, having tumbled 220 basis points on Friday. The yield on the 10-year government bond rose 21bp to 9.47 per cent.
Monday’s meeting has long been described by eurozone officials as a make-or-break session, the last possible moment for Athens to request an extension of its current bailout or face next month without any EU financial safety net for the first time in nearly five years.
Although the current programme runs through to the end of the month, at least six countries must get parliamentary approval of an extension, and eurozone officials had hoped to use the next two weeks to present an extension plan to these legislatures.
Several officials from countries that need parliamentary approvals acknowledged, however, that they still have time to get an agreement through their legislatures as long as it was agreed by the end of the week.
But Hans Jörg Schelling, finance minister of Austria, one of the countries that need parliamentary approval, warned that “it was a matter of days, not weeks” to get a deal done.
Without an extension of the current programme, focus appears to be turning to allowing the current bailout to expire and to quickly turn to negotiating a new rescue more amenable to the new Greek government.
“The second alternative would be the negotiation of a new programme but . . . time begins to run out,” said Mr Noonan.
One eurozone official said a second eurogroup meeting of finance ministers “is very much likely”, probably towards the end of this week.
Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, suggested to his fellow EU leaders at last week’s EU summit that a special gathering of eurozone heads of government might be needed this week, but officials said this is increasingly unlikely. One official suggested it could be held at the end of the month, but “only if the eurogroup meetings before had failed”.
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