Greece delays £300m payment to IMF
The break-up of the Eurozone will lead to the sort of “nationalisms” seen in the run up to the Second World War, Greece’s top negotiator Euclid Tsakalotos tells Channel 4 News.
He would not be drawn on how close a Greek involuntary default was, saying: “I think that, if reason prevails, if people see how reasonable we’ve been, there’s every chance of a good solution.”
Hours after Mr Tsakalotos spoke, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced that the country was to delay repaying its June instalments until the end of the month, then pay them in one.
“The Greek authorities have informed the Fund today that they plan to bundle the country’s four June payments into one, which is now due on June 30,” the global lender’s chief spokesman Gerry Rice said in a statement.
The IMF said that, under a decision taken in the late-1970s, its member nations can ask to bundle multiple principal payments into one payment to address the administrative difficulty of making multiple payments in a short period. According to the IMF, the step has only been taken once before – by Zambia in the 1980s.
But, speaking to Channel 4 News earlier on Thursday, Mr Tsakalotos insisted that he thought a positive outcome could be achieved “in the near future”.
“But Europe has to decide, it has to decide the democratic course, the flexible course, the course that incorporates social change, that incorporatess orrdniary people’s aspirations for a sense of belonging… that democracy counts, that democracy can change things or it can decide that it’s a rule-based institution for the rich,” he said.
“The markets change from day to day, [they] are not stable on this and they can change from news and news affects it more than it should do from day to day because things don’t change so quickly.”
Read more on Paul Mason's blog - Greece debt crisis: the unsustainable ultimatum
