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Greece has submitted a request to make all due payments to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the end of June. According to well-informed sources, the IMF will possibly approve the request of Athens.

Although this method of loan repayment is included in the IMF statutes, it has been used only once in the past. At the same time, Greece will receive additional time for negotiations with creditors.

During the press conference on the US economy, IMF Director Christine Lagarde appreciated the holding of "creative discussions" in Brussels, as she defined them. According to her, they will provide time to hear the views of the Greek government on the proposals of the creditors. "We are flexible compared to the previous programme," Lagarde said, adding that she refers to labour relations, budgetary consolidation and meeting deadlines. Christine Lagarde added that she was looking forward to the opinion of Athens and that the IMF was ready to offer alternative measures to achieve the objectives as long as they would be permanently implemented.

As for the questions about the IMF's position on the restructuring of Greek sovereign debt asked by the journalists, she said she would not want to examine the issue separately, as the programme "must make sense" in its entirety. "That is why the IMF is flexible to the evaluation of the measures associated with the budgetary targets. But if Athens moves away from these targets, the funding will have to be revised because it is a factor that affects the debt. And it in turn affects the interest rates and maturities."

For his part, IMF spokesman William Murray said in Washington that "the states have the opportunity to group their payments into one within a month and pay the total amount at the end of the month."

Zambia was the last country that used that option 30 years ago.