These excerpts from confidential International Monetary Fund documents, including board meeting minutes, staff briefs and board-member comments reveal considerable disagreement at the May 9, 2010 meeting at which the IMF board approved Greece’s first bailout.

Swiss executive director Rene Weber in a prepared statement to the board for the May 9, 2010 meeting:

We have “considerable doubts about the feasibility of the program…We have doubts on the growth assumptions, which seem to be overly benign. Even a small negative deviation from the baseline growth projections would make the debt level unsustainable over the longer term…Why has debt restructuring and the involvement of the private sector in the rescue package not been considered so far?”

Brazil’s executive director Paulo Nogueira Batista in a prepared statement to the board for the May 9, 2010 meeting:

“The risks of the program are immense…As it stands, the programs risks substituting private for official financing. In other and starker words, it may be seen not as a rescue of Greece, which will have to undergo a wrenching adjustment, but as a bailout of Greece’s private debt holders, mainly European financial institutions.”

“Our decision to go along with this problematic and risk-laden program should not be taken to mean that we will support it in the future. Going forward, we will consult with our authorities and other chairs to make sure that the fund is not led along the path of endorsing a program that may prove to be ill conceived and ultimately unsustainable.”