German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said there should be no debt relief for Athens, a day after Greece’s new finance minister announced he would no longer cooperate with auditors from the so-called troika of creditors.

At a strained press conference in Athens with Eurozone chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem on January 30, Yanis Varoufakis said Greece would no longer cooperate with its auditors from the troika — the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Varoufakis said Athens was willing to negotiate with its lenders but not with the troika auditors who he said were merely a “committee built on rotten foundations.”

Merkel told the Hamburger Abendblatt newspaper on January 31, “I do not envisage fresh debt cancellation. There has already been voluntary debt forgiveness by private creditors, banks have already slashed billions from Greece’s debt.”

Because the latest talks have yet to be concluded, Greece still has to receive the last, 7.2 billion-euro batch of its loans from the eurozone.

But Varoufakis said his government would reject that tranche.

Separately, the EU economic and financial affairs commissioner Pierre Moscovici said “we will do everything” to prevent Greece leaving the eurozone.

Courtesy of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL)

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