Merkel, waiting to see Greek debt proposals, insists on troika role

German lawmakers said Chancellor Angela Merkel had told them in closed-door talks on Tuesday that "troika" monitoring of Greece's bailout programme would not be scrapped as the new government in Athens has demanded. Publicly Merkel declined to comment on the new left-wing Greek government's plans to tackle its debt including a proposed debt swap, saying she needed first to see the details.
Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras wants to end the 240 billion euros bailout deal and co-operation with the "troika" of inspectors from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the European Commission. Conservative German lawmakers said Merkel had made clear to them that scrapping the troika's role in monitoring implementation of Greece's austerity measures would not be easy, not least for legal reasons.
"Merkel clearly wanted to indicate that there is a legal basis for the troika in the ESM treaty which cannot be dropped if you want to keep the programme," one parliamentarian said, on condition of anonymity. The ESM, or European Stability Mechanism, was set up during the euro zone debt crisis as a permanent firewall allowing the common currency area to provide access to financial help for member states in financial difficulty.
Participants at Tuesday's meeting also quoted the parliamentary floor leader of Merkel's conservatives, Volker Kauder, as saying Berlin should not change its stance with the new Athens government, adding: "Cheek shouldn't be rewarded." Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis floated on Monday the idea that Greek bonds held by the ECB and part of the debt owed to euro zone governments could be swapped for either growth-linked or perpetual bonds. Merkel said she was awaiting more details.
"It is clear that the Greek government is still working on its position. That is more than understandable if you look at how few days this government has been in office," Merkel told a joint news conference with the prime minister of Singapore.
"We are waiting for proposals and then we will enter talks ... I don't want to comment individually on all the details that are being disseminated," she added. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble will meet his Greek counterpart Varoufakis in Berlin on Thursday to discuss Athens' new policy proposals. The leader of the Eurosceptic Alternative for Germany (AfD) party told Reuters in an interview Greece's proposal to swap its foreign debt for growth-linked bonds was a disguised form of debt forgiveness.