Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis will not bring a list of new reform measures to the meeting of EU finance ministers later this week, he said in a newspaper interview Tuesday.

“The Eurogroup is not the right place to present proposals which haven’t been discussed and negotiated on a lower level before,” Varoufakis told the German mass-circulation daily Bild.

But he said the Greek negotiation team is “available at any time” to find a comprehensive solution with its partners “on condition that their representatives come to the table with a firm and clear mandate.”

Greece’s 240-billion-euro bailout expires on June 30, and to meet that deadline, a reform deal must be resolved by Thursday when the eurozone’s 19 finance ministers, who control the purse strings of the rescue programme, meet in Luxembourg.

Varoufakis said talks in Brussels collapsed on Sunday because “the representatives of the creditors told us that they didn’t have a mandate to hold in-depth negotiations over our proposals and measures to resolve the debt crisis.

“That’s the reason why there was no outcome,” Varoufakis said. Greece and its creditors are locked in a stalemate after the loan talks collapsed, bringing Athens just two weeks away from a catastrophic default on its debt.

While the European executive insisted the EU-IMF creditors had made “major concessions”, the radical-left government in Athens continues to reject what it views as “irrational” austerity demands.

The talks concerning the release of the 7.2 billion euros ($8.1 billion) in rescue funds remaining in Greece’s bailout have dragged on for five months.

Source: AFP