Greece has agreed to give creditors a new list of reforms to get its bailout back on track. On the sidelines of a summit in Brussels, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras held crunch talks with European leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande and the EU's top officials. They agreed to finish work "as fast as possible" on completing Greece's EU-IMF rescue programme, to free up crucial funds needed to help Athens avoid bankruptcy and a catastrophic exit from the euro.
Greece's creditors agreed in February to extend its 255-billion-US dollar bailout in exchange for promises of austerity reforms by Tsipras's new hard-left government. Athens wants the final seven-billion-euro tranche of the money to be paid out now, but Brussels wants more evidence of its commitment to the reforms. Merkel told a press conference that she and Hollande were "fully in line" with the agreement.
"The Greek government will take full responsibility for the reforms and will provide a list of reforms in the next few days. It will be a full list of more specific reforms...This all very quickly, so that a process of evaluation can be started. When the evaluation will be completed, when the facts will be analyzed, when the political talks with Brussels will be completed, cannot be said at this point," Merkel said.
"We are more optimistic after this deliberation. I think that all the sides confirmed their intention to try to do their best to overcome the difficulties of the Greek economy as soon as possible," Tsipras said.