Hopes of Greece deal rise ahead of crunch meeting in Brussels

Euro zone finance ministers gather tonight in Brussels for their third attempt in a week to settle a new funding arrangement for Greece.

Amid optimism in financial markets that a deal is finally in sight, the talks centre on a compromise plan from Athens in which the government of radical left premier Alexis Tsipras offered key policy concessions to its creditors.

In the absence of a deal, the situation remains tense. The European Central Bank sanctioned a further release of more than €900 million in emergency aid to Greek banks yesterday, its fourth such move in five working days as depositors pull their funds from the banks.

The banks are increasingly reliant on such aid to stay open and the ECB’s decision to review the situation on a day-to-day basis is seen as an effort to add urgency to the political talks.

Total ECB emergency aid to Greek banks now stands at some €89 billion, up from €83 billion only a week ago and an increasing source of political concern in Germany and other countries. Minister for Finance Michael Noonan raised the matter at the last round of emergency talks in Brussels on Monday.

European officials briefed on the engagements with Greece said the mood in the negotiation is better now than for months.

But they say the gap between the measures in the new Greek proposal and creditors’ demands is “still quite big”.

“There’s too much focus on taxation instead of expenditure cuts and the reform package is still a bit wishy-washy,” said one person with direct knowledge of the talks.

But the increasing anticipation of a deal this week drove global stock markets higher yesterday, with the value of European shares reaching their highest level for three weeks.

Such anticipation also lay behind a decline in the borrowing costs of Spain, one of the countries most exposed to any failure in the current talks and a Greek exit from the euro zone.

“A deal remains the more probable outcome,” said Merrion Capital economist Alan McQuaid in a note.

However, he remained concerned that participants “are underestimating the potential fallout from a Greek exit from the euro”.

European officials recognise that Mr Tsipras faces a political challenge in his own right to steer any eventual agreement through parliament in Athens.

They also recognise that a deal this week would bring forward questions around the extent of any further rescue programme for Greece and Mr Tsipras’s demands for a deal to lower the burden of the country’s vast national debt.

The immediate priority, however, is to secure consensus on fiscal policy measures to be executed in Greece in return for the release of €7.2 billion in rescue loans.

These loans, the last under the 2012 rescue programme for Greece, have been delayed for 12 months amid complaints from bailout monitors at the country’s failure to implement policy measures set out in that plan.

The €7.2 billion disbursement is required to ensure Athens makes a €1.6 billion debt repayment to the International Monetary Fund next Tuesday and to make further payments, totalling €6.7 billion, to the ECB and national central banks in the next two months.

The first €3.5 billion payment is due on July 20th and the second, for €3.2 billion, must be made on August 20th.

These payments are mainly in respect of the principal amount due on the expiry of Greek sovereign bonds held by central banks in the wake of the 2010 ECB programme in which it first bought the debt of crisis-struck euro zone countries.

Officials expect a final push today before ministerial advisers gather before their political masters meet at 7pm in Brussels.

At this meeting the objective remains to have a deal in place to be noted by heads of state and government when they meet tomorrow for the second summit of the week.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde provided a vivid illustration of the divide still to be bridged when she said, late on Monday, that the new Greek plan was “still short of everything that we expected”.

The package was “certainly more comprehensive and includes much more detail than what we have seen, but it still lacks specificity”, she said.