Calm confusion as Greece waits on debt deal from EU

There was an uneasy calm and lots of confusion at the end of the four-hour meeting of eurozone finance ministers yesterday after they failed to make progress on a new deal for Greece.

Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis said he had been prepared to sign a document given him by economics commissioner Pierre Moscovici at the start of the meeting, but it was withdrawn before he could do so.

He accused the Dutch president of the eurozone, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, of replacing it with a document that Athens could not sign.

Mr Varoufakis said they wished to apply for a four-month extension of the loan agreement. “I have no doubt that within the next 48 hours, official Europe will come together and we will find the phrasing necessary and build a new contract that will be good for both Greece and Europe.”

However, after the meeting Mr Dijsselbloem, an advocate of austerity, demanded the new government ask for an extension of its current bailout — and once that was done, they could spend the next few months discussing flexibility and new terms.

The new deadline is Friday, he warned, because if Athens manages to get all its eurozone partners to support such an extension, they will need the following 10 days to get agreement from their national parliaments before the current programme runs out at the end of the month.

Irish Finance Minister Michael Noonan said that even though, strictly speaking, he wouldn’t need the Oireachtas to agree to extending the programme, he would bring the issue to the Dáil.

There is a pot of almost €15bn waiting to be given to Greece but first they must cross the rubicon of having their current position assessed, and since they have not fulfilled the conditions of the linked programme, they must seek an extension.

The response from Athens was swift and angry. “The Greeks didn’t ask for a more flexible austerity programme. They asked for the end of the austerity programme,” Mr Varoufakis’s people tweeted.

“The Eurogroup can’t even think outside the logic of existing programme. They still live in the old world while Syriza is bringing in the new.”

There were reports of frustration from inside the meeting when ministers failed to receive the hoped-for proposal from Greece of the 30% of their existing programme which they said they rejected and wanted to replace.

While Mr Dijsselbloem insisted that the “ball was now in Greece’s court”, and it was up to Athens to come forward with a workable solution, Mr Varoufakis insisted it was the other way around.

He said Athens had reiterated that they were willing to honour all the commitments made, and commit to the current programme. They were willing to discuss conditions and believed this would be more than enough to establish a completely new contract. “It should be a contract rather than a programme, because a contract is between two equals.”