La zona euro y el IMF llegan a un acuerdo acerca de la deuda Griega. Grecia recibira con este acuerdo prestamos nuevos y alivio de su deuda en el futuro.
Eurozone and IMF Strike Deal on Greek Debt
Agreement after months of delays sets a road map for debt relief but pushes back action until 2018
By VIKTORIA DENDRINOU and GABRIELE STEINHAUSER
May 24, 2016 8:59 p.m. ET
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BRUSSELS—Eurozone finance ministers and the International Monetary Fund patched together a deal in the early hours of Wednesday that clears the way for fresh loans for Greece and sets out how the country could get debt relief in the future.
The ministers, who held an 11-hour meeting in Brussels, said Greece had done what was necessary to unlock the next slice of financial aid, concluding a review of its bailout that was delayed for months. The new payouts will save Greece from defaulting on big debt redemptions to the IMF and European Central Bank in July.
“On the package of reforms Greece had committed to last summer, we now have full agreement,” said Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the Dutch finance minister who presided over the meeting of finance ministers.
Once all 19 eurozone countries have formally signed off on the new deal, Greece will get €10.3 billion ($11.48 billion) in fresh loans, starting with a €7.5 billion installment in the second half of June.
The ministers also agreed on a road map to ease Greece’s mountain of debt, moving to end a long-standing standoff with the IMF over the type and scale of relief Athens needs.
“It is an important moment for Greece after so much time,” said Greek Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos.
Wednesday’s deal required all key parties in the negotiations to let go of some of their demands and go further on other elements than they had said was possible: Greece had to adopt more austerity than it had signed up for last summer; Germany had to promise more measures to ease Greece’s payment burden; and the IMF had to accept that the most important debt-relief measures wouldn’t be enacted until at least 2018, when Greece’s current bailout deal ends.
Among the steps that will be considered in 2018 are caps and deferrals on interest rates as well as the return to Athens of profits from Greek government bonds held by eurozone central banks, Mr. Dijsselbloem said. The eurozone may also use leftover funds from its own bailout to repay earlier other official loans, for instance from the IMF.
“This is stretching what I thought would have been possible not so long ago,” Mr. Dijsselbloem said.
Postponement of these steps had been a key condition by Germany and other eurozone hawks, which are reluctant to debate Greek debt relief in their parliaments at the moment. Crucially, the deal delays a vote on debt relief in Germany’s Bundestag until after general elections in 2017.
Mr. Dijsselbloem said the agreement on debt relief, along with a promise to look at further action if necessary, should be enough to bring the IMF back on board by the end of the year. But a few obstacles remain until Greece can actually expect fresh money from the Washington-based fund.
Poul Thomsen, the director of the IMF’s European department, said the deal shows that the eurozone is willing to consider the kind of measures needed to make Greece’s debt sustainable. However, he stressed that the fund would only provide more loans once it has assessed the actual impact of the promised moves.
“There are some measures that still need to be calibrated,” he said.
Mr. Thomsen said that the fund had made “a major concession” in allowing the majority of the debt relief to be implemented only years from now.
“We have shown flexibility,” he said.
The IMF, which has co-financed Greece’s first two bailouts, had so far declined to contribute to the third loan package—agreed upon in August—claiming that the country’s debt is too high to ever be paid off.
During the late-night talks, ministers went through several drafts of their decisions, discarding earlier versions that were deemed too weak. Much of the actual negotiation happened in meetings between German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, the IMF’s Mr. Thomsen and Mr. Dijsselbloem, while the other ministers waited in a separate room, according to officials familiar with the talks.
At one point, progress was delayed because Mr. Thomsen couldn’t reach IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, who was at a conference in Kazakhstan, the officials said.
“It was a complicated birth tonight. It’s probably about as good as it gets,” Slovakia’s finance minister, Peter Kazimir, said in a tweet.
The deal comes two days after Greek lawmakers approved new taxes and austerity measures demanded by its creditors. That package also included a mechanism that will force some €3.6 billion in automatic spending cuts should the government fail to meet budget targets.
Greece’s Mr. Tsakalotos said the deal finally gave his country some light at the end of the tunnel.
“This can be the beginning of turning Greece’s vicious cycle of recession into one where investors have a clear runway to invest in Greece,” he said.
Write to Viktoria Dendrinou at
viktoria.dendrinou@wsj.com and Gabriele Steinhauser at
gabriele.steinhauser@wsj.com