Greece nears euro exit as bailout talks break up

So, another crunch meeting fails to deliver a breakthough. But this wasn’t any old failed eurogroup meeting. This might be remembered as a classic.

   We had Germany producing a half-baked scheme to boot Greece out for five years, Finland’s new government on the edge of meltdown, and Italy preparing to raise the stakes on Sunday by telling Germany that enough is enough.

   Meanwhile, Greece’s economy is in freefall, its banks are on the edge, and its political class are reeling after Alexis Tsipras offered billions of euros in fresh austerity to get a deal. From Brussels, our Europe editor Ian Traynor sums up the situation after another frustrating, and sometimes bizarre, day:

   Greece’s final attempt to avoid being kicked out of the euro by securing a new three-year bailout worth up to €80bn ran into a wall of resistance from the eurozone’s fiscal hawks on Saturday.

   Finland rejected any more funding for the country and Germany called for Greece to be turfed out of the currency bloc for at least five years.

   The last chance talks between the 19 eurozone finance ministers in Brussels ran into the early hours of the morning as they struggled to draft a policy paper for national leaders at yet another emergency summit on Sunday that was billed as the decisive meeting.

   With Greece on the edge of financial and social implosion, eurozone finance ministers met to decide on the country’s fate and on what to do about its debt crisis, after experts from the troika of creditors said that new fiscal rigour proposals from Athens were good enough to form “the basis for negotiations”.

   But the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, dismissed that view, supported by a number of northern and eastern European states. A German finance ministry paper said: “These proposals cannot build the basis for a completely new, three-year [bailout] programme, as requested by Greece.”

   It called for Greece to be expelled from the eurozone for a minimum of five years and demanded that the Greek government transfer €50bn of state assets to an outside agency for sell-off.

   Timo Soini, the nationalist True Finns leader, meanwhile, threatened to bring down the government in Helsinki if Alex Stubb, the finance minister, agreed to a new bailout for Greece. Stubb apparently came to the crunch meeting on a new bailout without a mandate to agree one.....

Πηγή: theguardian.com