Yiannis Mouzakis via Macropolis | During 2015, Greece’s ability to meet its debt obligations became one of the most drama-ridden aspects of a story that started unfolding when SYRIZA won the January elections.

The newly elected government’s instant choice to follow confrontational tactics with Greece’s lenders and its loudly stated intention to stay away from any assistance programme resembling the arrangements of the two previous ones meant that any troika financing was put immediately on hold. This left Alexis Tsipras’s government with little choice but to start scraping the bottom of the funding barrel very early on.

Routine debt servicing and other obligations like the habitual rollover of T-Bills quickly became sources of drama, with the flames often fanned by statements of government and party members, including Tsipras himself, that Greece would pay pensions and salaries rather than the IMF if it was forced to make a choice.

Tsipras found himself in this exact position at the start of the summer, when Greece became the only developed country in arrears to the IMF after requesting to bundle all four June payments into one and finally missing that payment altogether at the end of the month.

To make ends meet, the Finance Ministry was looking for cash in every nook and cranny, collecting via repo operations, often with forceful persuasion, cash reserves from state owned enterprises, municipalities and other state bodies. Tsipras maxed out the cash management technique that his predecessor, Antonis Samaras, had used extensively when his own review was not going according to plan and programme disbursements were not forthcoming.

Financing via repos stood at 8.44 billion euros when Tsipras took power, peaking at 16.87 billion in July. By the end of June the deposits of the Hellenic Republic had dropped to a mere 77 million as more than 2.5 billion had been sapped in the previous twelve months by finance ministers Gikas Hardouvelis and his successor Yanis Varoufakis.

However, since the agreement of the July 12 summit there has been nothing to suggest a repeat of the tension of 2015. In fact, since Tsipras signed the agreement he has paid over 4 billion euros to the IMF and nobody seems to have noticed. Not only did he emerge victorious from the September election, his new government has managed to legislate all prior actions (in excess of 60) meet milestones and receive the relevant disbursements. Tsipras is fully compliant with the implementation of measures that this time last year he would not even touch with a barge pole.

Greece’s debt servicing profile in 2016 is quite benign. Privately held debt maturities come to just 1.7 billion euros, obligations to the IMF are under 4 billion, the ECB again poses a major hump in July with maturities of 2.3 billion euros while the overall interest bill is below 6 billion. In total, Greece needs 13.7 billion euros to meet all its debt obligations, which translates into 7.9 percent of GDP, almost half of what the IMF and the other institutions in the quartet consider a sustainable gross debt servicing burden.