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Eurogroup called Varoufakis a gambler, amateur and a time-waster

24 April 2015 / 21:04:34  GRReporter
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In expectation of the press conference after the end of the meeting of the finance ministers of the member countries of the Euro-area in Riga, many of the international media correspondents started publishing comments in the social networks one after another. According to them, Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis has come under verbal fire from his colleagues, some of whom have called him ''a time-waster, amateur and gambler''. The electronic edition of the British Guardian immediately published one of the comments in Twitter and added: ''Could someone in Riga please pass Yanis Varoufakis a sponge and a towel? Sounds like he's had a bad morning.''

In his statement after the end of the Eurogroup meeting, the finance minister of Malta declared that the communication between Greece and the countries' creditors is  ''totally done away with''.
According to the economic edition Bloomberg, Yanis Varoufakis has been hammered by the disappointed Euro-area finance ministers.  Even before the beginning of the meeting, its bad atmosphere for Greece was evident. The finance minister of Germany – Wolfgang Schäuble, for example, recommended to the journalists to go for a walk and do some sightseeing in Riga, as the meeting would end with no result.


A contribution of Eurogroup Chairman Jeroen Dijsselbloem followed, where he claimed that the need for Greece and its creditors to come to an agreement is urgent for all, but mostly for Athens. In addition he subsequently said that he expected to hear from the representatives of the institutions (supervisory Troika) as to how the results of the negotiations results were progressing.  
During the press conference after the meeting, he claimed that Greece would not get a third programme for  financial assistance in June unless the monitoring of the present programme was completed. Jeroen Dijsselbloem also underlined that should the Greek Government not present a complete programme with reforms, the allowance of the parts of the support tranche would be impossible. He expressed his Eurogroup colleagues` position that Greece must speed up its actions, as a lot of time had been lost over the past two months.   
''Two months ago  we negotiated something concrete. Today we wanted to come to an agreement but we had not made enough progress in these negotiations. We had a critical discussion and, as a whole, a feeling of an urgent situation settled in the hall“, he stated.
Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, on his part, declared his confidence that an agreement with the creditors would be reached very soon, but he also claimed that this would be quite difficult.
According to his words, Athens does not agree to accept the assistance pensions cutting, nor to cancel the defence of the first dwelling of the borrowers from the auctions. 

 

Tags: Varoufakis Eurogroup Riga Greece bailout Greek debt
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