Greece has begun talks for ending IMF aid to the country, but is set to continue to have routine post-bailout reviews by the Washington-based group, a Greek official said after talks with IMF managing director Christine Lagarde on Sunday.
The IMF is deeply unpopular in Greece for insisting on austerity cuts under Greece’s multibillion US dollar EU/IMF bailout, and Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras hopes that cutting ties with the IMF will help turn around his flagging political fortunes.
Greek leaders told the IMF that the crisis-stricken nation could quit its rescue program more than a year early when officials met in Washington.
Greek Minister of Finance Gikas Hardouvelis told Lagarde that Athens can do without further loans, which have propped up the nation’s economy since it came close to crashing on a mountain of deficit and debt in 2010.
“We don’t need the rest of the money that from the start of next year we were on course to get from the current memorandum. We can leave it one-and-a-half years earlier ... that is our goal,” Samaras said.
Aid disbursements from the IMF had been due to expire in March 2016, in contrast to funds from eurozone countries, which end this year.
At 240 billion euros (US$304 billion), the lifeline was the largest rescue program in global financial history and was aimed at preventing the debt crisis that affected Athens from spreading to the rest of the eurozone.
Samaras denies that Greece now wants an acrimonious divorce from the IMF.
The organization, perhaps more than the EU, has insisted on tough reforms and austerity measures in return for the rescue funds.
The tightening has exacerbated a six-year recession, the worst on record, left a quarter of the workforce unemployed and seen support for Samaras’s fragile coalition fall.
Hardouvelis, who met Lagarde with Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras, presented a plan detailing the nation’s ability to cover its financing needs from bond markets.
“Everything is on the table, the discussions have started ... we will have a relationship with the IMF, but not under the same conditions,” a Greek Ministry of Finance spokesperson said.
Last week, Lagarde said she believed Athens would continue to require aid before it could go it alone.
“The country would be, in our view, in a better position if it had precautionary support,” she said. “So we are talking about evolution in the relationship, but we believe that the relationship can still be extremely helpful for the country to move on.”
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