Greece ‘won’t take orders anymore via email’

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras last night told politicians in Athens that the government is seeking a bridge agreement to provide government funding until June, when he hopes to have a more lasting arrangement with international creditors.

“Greece has submitted its own proposals and won’t take orders anymore via emails,” Tsipras said in a challenge to EU officials who say the country should request an extension of its bailout plan.

“It is an irrevocable decision of our government to implement its campaign pledges in full,” he said. “The bailout failed.

“The new government is not justified in asking for an extension... because it cannot ask for an extension of mistakes.”

Tsipras, whose Syriza party swept into power two weeks ago, is seeking to keep Greece financially afloat while breaking free from its international bailout programme. There are doubts about Greece’s ability to pay its bills, possibly as early as the end of the month.

In a lengthy list of policy actions, Tsipras said the government plans to restore the tax-free threshold for individual workers to €12,000 a year and gradually raise the minimum wage to €751 a month through 2016.

Both measures would reverse changes made by previous governments as conditions of Greece’s bailout programme.

He also ruled out firesales of state assets designed to revive finances and said the government would not seek an extension of the bailout.

“I am not in favour of handing over money to the Greeks,” Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann said in an interview with the Kurier newspaper before Tsipras’s speech.

“Who’s supposed to pay for that? I do, however, support negotiations over technical credit conditions so that the country will have more room to manoeuvre to exit the crisis.”

Faymann, who hosts Tsipras at a one-day summit in Vienna today, said both Europe and Greece should be spared the option of the country exiting the euro-zone.

Alan Greenspan, the former head of the US Federal Reserve, said Greece will have to leave the eurozone sooner or later.

“It is a crisis and I don’t see it being resolved easily, in fact I don’t see it being resolved without Greece leaving the eurozone,” he told BBC radio yesterday.

“I don’t see that it helps them to be in the euro and I certainly don’t see how it helps the rest of the eurozone.

“And I think it’s just a matter of time before everyone realises that parting is the best strategy.”

Greenspan, who was head of the Federal Reserve from 1987 to 2006, said that the eurozone could not continue in its current form without political integration.

Germany and the ECB have indicated that there is little room for manoeuvre on the terms of Greece’s €240bn EU-IMF rescue deal.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, head of the group of 19 eurozone finance ministers, on Friday rejected a short-term financing agreement while Greece negotiates a successor programme to its current bailout.

Greece’s public debt stands at more than €320bn, or about 175% of GDP. That makes Greece Europe’s most-indebted country when measured against output.

The next showdown with Greece’s EU partners is scheduled for Wednesday in Brussels, when Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis will, for the first time, face his 18 eurozone counterparts, including Michael Noonan, in an emergency meeting to discuss the way forward for the country.

Bloomberg