Eurozone fails to reach Greece debt deal amid IMF row

Eurozone finance ministers failed to reach a deal for fresh bailout cash for Greece on Monday, as a row with the International Monetary Fund over debt relief continued.

Greece needs new cash from the Eurozone to avoid a default in July when it has to repay some €7.3 billion worth of maturing loans. To get the money, the Greek parliament approved pension cuts and tax hikes last Thursday.

After more than eight hours of talks in Brussels, ministers from the 19-member single currency bloc could not settle deep differences on debt relief pitting Germany, the Eurozone's most powerful member, against the IMF.

Several Eurozone governments, notably Germany, do not want to pay out any new loans until the IMF joins the bailout, and the IMF says it can only do so if it gets more clarity from the Eurozone on what kind of debt relief it will offer Greece at the end of the bailout in 2018 to make its debt sustainable.

"The Eurogroup held an in-depth discussion on the sustainability of Greece's public debt but did not reach an overall agreement," the Eurozone ministers said in a statement.

"Work will continue in the coming weeks within the framework agreed in May 2016 with a view to reaching a definitive conclusion at the next Eurogroup meeting. This includes an ambitious and economically sound medium-term primary surplus path for Greece," the statement said.

"I think we are very close to that agreement, but tonight we were unable to close a possible gap between what could be done and what some of us had expected should be done or could be done," Eurogroup president Jeroen Dijsselbloem told a news conference.

The ministers and the IMF agreed Greece would keep a primary surplus - the budget balance before debt servicing - at 3.5% of GDP for five years after the end of the bailout in 2018, before the surplus can fall.

With regard to the disbursement, for this to take place, Greece needs to implement some 140 "prior actions" - laws that have to be passed to make the reforms stick - and even though most of them had been done, some still remained to be completed.

The chairman of euro zone finance ministers Dijsselbloem said that work was progressing for the disbursement to take place "before the summer".

The IMF has made more debt relief a condition of taking part in Greece's third and latest €86 billion  bailout, agreed two years ago.