The eurozone’s most hawkish member states have laid out their positions ahead of a discussion on Greece’s bailout progress today, following an escalation in tensions between its creditors in recent weeks, the Financial Times reported.

Wanted: a chief executive to run Greece's bank-rescue fund. Job description: work hard and pray for a miracle. Greece has failed to find a boss for its Hellenic Financial Stability Fund since July, when its three-member executive team resigned, the International New York Times reported on a Reuters story. A new CEO, offered the job in late October quit a week later. His predecessor, an interim boss, had lasted two months.

Geoffrey Stevenson, who was in charge of exploration company Petroceltic’s prime asset in the Algerian desert until the company was bought out of examinership last year following a bitter takeover battle, is taking on the new owners of the business in the High Court in Dublin, the Irish Times reported. Mr Stevenson was not an employee of Petroceltic prior to the takeover by Swiss-Cayman Islands fund Worldview Capital, but rather he was a consultant and also project director at Petroceltic’s Ain Tsila gas field project in Algeria.

In a related story, the reported that eurozone finance ministers will miss next week’s deadline for an agreement with the International Monetary Fund to release €7bn in aid to Greece, forcing the bailout fight into the Dutch and French election season where diplomats fear it could become highly politicized. EU officials said that the two sides remained at loggerheads over an IMF demand that Athens be granted significant debt relief and easier surplus targets, meaning that a deal that had been hoped for at a high-stakes ministerial meeting on Monday may now be months away.

The rise of populist parties in France and Italy is awakening an old fear in Europe: that public debt may be forcibly switched back into former national currencies if countries exit the monetary union, Bloomberg News reported. The concern is reminiscent of the depths of the euro region debt crisis, when doubts about Greece’s ability to meet its obligations sent investors scrambling to offload exposure -- and dust off their legal textbooks.

The Central Bank has sold a further €500 million of bonds that were linked to the restructuring four years ago of the bailout of now-defunct Anglo Irish Bank, the Irish Times reported. The Central Bank received €25 billion of government bonds in February 2013 under a complex restructuring of promissory notes used by the State during the financial crisis to rescue the bank, which was subsequently named Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC). IBRC had been using the promissory notes as collateral for emergency funding at the Central Bank.

Greece's economy has met its budget targets and there is therefore no reason for further austerity measures to be imposed as part of a deal with bailout creditors, the government spokesman said Thursday. Greece has been struggling for months to conclude negotiations with its creditors on spending cuts and reforms demanded by European creditors and the International Monetary Fund as part of its third bailout program, The New Zealand Herald reported on an Associated Press story. It hopes to reach an agreement in time for a Monday meeting of eurozone finance ministers.

Spain’s inflation rate has been confirmed at a more than four year high of 2.9 per cent in January, coming in just below a 3 per cent initial estimate but still underscoring the diverging inflationary performances of countries in the Eurozone, the Financial Times reported. EU-harmonised consumer prices in the eurozone’s fourth largest economy leapt from 1.6 per cent in December, pushed up by the cost of housing and electricity. The 2.9 per cent reading is the highest since December 2012.

Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic promised the IMF to restructure, close or sell hundreds of money-losing companies that robbed the budget of as much as $1 billion a year, Bloomberg News reported. The list includes coal miner JP PEU Resavica, the Rudarsko-topionicarski basen Bor copper miner, and chemical producers Azotara doo and Metanolsko Sircetni Kompleks MSK. After Serbia pared its fiscal gap to 1.4 percent of economic output last year from 6.6 percent in 2014, ending aid to companies would “cement gains,” Sosa said, though “vested interests” may make trims more difficult.

The Government will seek EU funding to help businesses affected by the UK’s departure from the union, the Taoiseach said on Wednesday afternoon, in a major speech on the Coalition’s Brexit policy. Speaking at an Institute of International and European Affairs event at the Mansion House in Dublin, the Taoiseach said that “stabilisation and adjustment measures” for the businesses most affected by Brexit will be funded by the Government, the Irish Times reported. He said support for these measures will be sought from Brussels.