Greece

A political row has erupted in Athens after the former head of a big Greek state bank admitted to transferring €8m of personal savings abroad to buy a London property months before his Agricultural Bank headed towards insolvency, the Financial Times reported. Theodoros Pantalakis, former chief executive of Greece’s Agricultural Bank (ATEbank), strongly denied any wrongdoing, telling Realnews, a Greek website, that he had declared the transaction to authorities in 2011 and had paid tax on the amount transferred.

Greece's latest fiscal and reform pledges may be enough to convince international lenders weary after years of broken promises to keep Athens hooked to a 130 billion euro lifeline, but the battle to implement it will be epic, Reuters reported. Few question the new coalition government's resolve but many doubt whether the cantankerous public sector can or will implement the measures or the Greek public, reeling from years of austerity, can take much more without putting up a fight.

Greece's international creditors have called on Athens to provide more details on its €11.5 billion ($14.14 billion) austerity plan that is crucial to keeping the country's funding lines open, as Athens faced dwindling cash reserves, The Wall Street Journal reported. A visiting delegation of international representatives met Thursday with Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras and agreed to see him again on Sunday in an effort to reach a deal on the cuts needed to pay the next tranche from the country's second €173 billion bailout.

Greece’s three-party coalition has reached agreement on €11.5bn of spending cuts over the next two years after the socialist party leader dropped objections to further planned reductions in pensions and public sector wages, the Financial Times reported. Evangelos Venizelos, a former finance minister facing dissent in his PanHellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok), had distanced himself from both coalition partners and Greece’s international lenders by demanding the cuts be postponed until 2015-16.

Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras's allies are pushing for two more years to implement unpopular austerity cuts before they sign off on them, sources close to the parties said on Monday, potentially delaying a deal on the savings demanded by lenders, Reuters reported. The three parties in Samaras's coalition have agreed on the bulk of the nearly 12 billion euros in cuts that Greece must produce to satisfy inspectors from the European Union and International Monetary Fund bailing out the nation.

European policymakers are working on "last chance" options to bring Greece's debts down and keep it in the euro zone, with the ECB and national central banks looking at taking significant losses on the value of their bond holdings, officials said. Private creditors have already suffered big writedowns on their Greek bonds under a second bailout for Athens sealed in February, but this was not enough to put the country back on the path to solvency and a further restructuring is on the cards.

Political leaders in Greece have agreed on most of the austerity measures demanded by its creditors and are now eyeing pension and wage cuts to find the final 1.5 billion euros of savings still needed, a source close to the talks said on Sunday, Reuters reported. Greece must find savings worth 11.5 billion euros for 2013 and 2014 to satisfy its increasingly impatient lenders, who are currently visiting Athens to evaluate the country's progress in complying with the terms of its latest bailout.

Greece may need a second debt restructuring to stay in the euro, a leading political ally of Chancellor Angela Merkel said. The comments by Norbert Barthle, the Christian Democratic Union’s parliamentary budget spokesman, are the first indication by a senior German official that additional help for Greece may be forthcoming to avert the market turmoil that would be triggered by its exit from the 17-nation currency region, Bloomberg reported. “We should try to keep Greece in the euro zone,” Barthle said by phone today.

Greece is unlikely to be able to pay what it owes and further debt restructuring is likely to be necessary, three EU officials said on Tuesday, a cost that would have to fall on the European Central Bank and euro zone governments. The officials said that twice bailed-out Greece would be found to be way off track by EU and International Monetary Fund officials who have been assessing the country.

Greece is in a "Great Depression" similar to the American one in the 1930s, the country's prime minister Antonis Samaras has told former US president Bill Clinton, the Irish Times reported. Mr Samaras was speaking before a team of Greece's international lenders arrive in Athens to push for further cuts needed for the debt-laden country to qualify for further rescue payments and avoid a chaotic default.