Greece Points Finger at IMF for Bailout Delay as Talks Continue.Minister of State Nikos Pappas said, Greece expects an agreement with creditors on its next tranche of emergency loans before or just after Orthodox Easter on May 1, adding the International Monetary Fund has been stalling negotiations.
“We have almost identical estimates with the European Commission,” Pappas said in an interview in his office at the Prime Minister’s residence overlooking the national gardens in Athens. “And what needs to be done in the following days is to turn the almost identical to identical.”
Bailout auditors from the commission, the European Stability Mechanism, the European Central Bank and the IMF have been in talks with government officials in Athens for the past week, negotiating policy measures attached to the country’s bailout. The biggest area of contention is the management of bad loans burdening bank balance sheets, Pappas said, with positions closer on pension system overhaul and income tax reform. Greece isn’t backing down from its call for debt relief backed by the IMF, he said.
“Greece, the European creditors and the IMF would really have to mess it up for things to go wrong this time,” Athanasios Vamvakidis, strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, wrote in a note to clients on Friday.
Ice Cream Promise
Greek bonds have gained on expectations of an agreement, delivering the best returns of all European sovereign securities tracked by Bloomberg’s World Bond Indexes in the past month. Greek stocks rose 1.3 percent on Friday.
The negotiations on the bailout were originally scheduled to conclude at the end of last year. Pappas attributes the delay to the IMF disputing the effectiveness of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’ proposals for additional budget savings and its pessimistic view of the Greek economy.
“It’s like they’re asking us to jump from the fifth floor and they promise that someone will buy us ice cream,” he said.
The IMF keeps saying that the numbers must add up but the “numbers of the IMF almost never add up,” Pappas said from his office where he displays the front-page of the Italian leftist newspaper L’Unità from 1984 covering the death of communist leader Enrico Berlinguer. “They can’t agree among themselves on the data – not just the effectiveness of the measures we propose, but also the starting point for the Greek economy.”
Tsipras’ Syriza is in coalition with the Independent Greeks party. Pappas expects support for the government to expand after striking a deal with creditors.
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