Greece to Propose a Debt Compromise Plan to Creditors

By LIZ ALDERMAN and NIKI KITSANTONISFEB. 9, 2015

The New York Times

ATHENS — Hoping to defuse a standoff that has set Europe and financial markets on edge, Greek officials intend to propose a detailed compromise plan at an emergency meeting with creditors on Wednesday in Brussels, a finance ministry official here said on Monday.

The plan will include the possibility of tapping part of a bailout loan disbursement of 7 billion euros, or $7.9 billion, that Athens had been saying it would reject, according to the official, who insisted on anonymity because the plans had not yet been made public.

Greece still plans to reject some of the harshest austerity conditions attached to Greece’s bailout loans, but will propose retaining about 70 percent of the terms, according to the official.

Athens will propose replacing the remaining 30 percent of the austerity conditions with new reforms that the Greek government will devise together with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The O.E.C.D. represents about three dozen of the world’s richest economies, including those of many of the European countries to which Greece owes money.

The proposal, to be made at a gathering of eurozone finance ministers on Wednesday in Brussels, would also significantly extend the period Greece proposes for reaching a “new contract” with its creditors — by asking for a bridge-financing program through the end of August, instead of the May time frame Greek officials had previously discussed.

The offer was being pulled together as the dispute escalated between Greece and its European creditors. In a speech in Parliament on Sunday, the new prime minister, Alexis Tsipras, appeared to draw a hard line, saying he was determined to eliminate Greece’s “cruel” austerity program. German officials have insisted that Greece would get no money to help pay debts unless it adhered to the conditions of the bailout program agreed to in 2012.

Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany appeared to show little leeway on Monday. “The basic rules” of the Greek bailout program “have always been the same,” she said at a joint news conference with President Obama in Washington. “You put in your own efforts and on the other side you’re being shown solidarity. A quid pro quo.”

Mr. Obama, who last week warned Europe not to press too hard on austerity, said he was anticipating Ms. Merkel’s appraisal and hoped Europe would find ways to improve growth.

“I look forward to hearing Angela’s assessment of how Europe and the I.M.F. can work with the new Greek government to find a way that returns Greece to sustainable growth within the eurozone,” Mr. Obama said at the news conference, noting that European growth was important for the global economy and the United States. The International Monetary Fund is one of Greece’s creditors.

Despite the charm offensive mounted by Greece’s new leftist-led government in European capitals last week, the country’s European creditors have shown little inclination to help Mr. Tsipras and his cabinet follow through on their campaign pledges to relax the austerity budget measures that were a condition of the bailout. The standoff has raised concerns that Greece might be heading for a default on its debt or an exit from the euro currency union.

On Monday, Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission — the executive arm of the European Union — said in Brussels that “Greece should not assume that the overall mood has so changed that the eurozone will adopt Tsipras’s government program unconditionally.”

The Athens stock exchange slumped on Monday’s tensions, with bank stocks falling as much as 14 percent. The yield on Greek three-year government bonds — a debt security of which Mr. Tsipras wants to issue more often to cover Greece’s financing needs — surged to 21.74 percent, the highest since July. If yields stayed at that level, the Greek government could find new borrowing unaffordable.

Greek government officials, for their part, say they do not believe European officials will let Greece go bankrupt or leave the European Union — a fate Mr. Tsipras has said he also wants to avoid. The eurozone could collapse “like a house of cards” if that were to happen, Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s new finance minister, warned on Sunday in an interview on Italian television.

Greece’s creditors — the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the I.M.F. — want the government to seek an extension beyond Feb. 28 of the European portion of the €240 billion bailout. But the government has been saying it is not interested in the latest portion of the bailout, the loan of €7 billion, because of what it sees as conditions that have hurt average Greeks.

The apparent reversal of that position on Monday comes as Greece is running low on cash as well as time to pay off a looming series of debts. The official said Greece would also ask its European Union partners on Wednesday for the right to issue about €8 billion of further short-term debt above a current €15 billion limit. The government would further seek permission to raise the amount of money that Greek banks can tap under an emergency liquidity assistance program. There have been signs that capital has been fleeing Greek bank accounts.

Greece will also ask its European creditors to give it €1.9 billion in profits that they have made on their holdings of Greek bonds, the official said, and propose that some €11 billion euros in residual funding from the recapitalization of Greek banks be used to help Greek lenders deal with nonperforming loans.

The Greek government also plans to pledge that it will crack down on tax evasion and corruption.

Among other measures, Greek officials will ask creditors to agree that the country's “humanitarian crisis” be addressed by allowing the new government to roll back a series of austerity measures that Mr. Tsipras outlined Sunday, including increasing some low-level pensions by the end of the year, immediately restoring collective wage bargaining and bringing unions back into negotiations on workers’ salaries and working conditions.

The government will also push for the minimum wage to gradually be restored to €751 a month, up from €586 currently.

At least one key European official indicated on Monday that Greece might continue to meet a skeptical audience among its creditors. If Greece wants to buy time by arranging some sort of bridge financing, it must still submit to an internationally supervised program of economic reforms, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, said at a meeting of the Group of 20 finance ministers on Monday in Istanbul.

“Without a program, things will be tough for Greece,” Mr. Schäuble said. “I wouldn’t know how financial markets will handle it without a program, but maybe he knows better,” he said, referring to Mr. Tsipras.