Troika Puts Off Athens Return

They’re coming. They’re not coming. They’re coming. Turns out they’re not coming. Envoys from Greece’s international lenders, who’ve been in and out of Athens, now said they have postponed a scheduled return next week that was supposed to restart stalled talks on disagreements over the size of a 2014 budget deficit and other delayed reforms.
Greece can’t get a pending one billion euro ($1.37 billion) installment until a deal is reached and with a meeting of Eurozone finance chiefs looming on Dec. 9 the government was anxious to make progress and get it done after repeatedly frustrating failures for the two sides to come together.
“We can’t go back to Athens and then interrupt the review again. That’s already happened twice,” an unnamed European official told Kathimerini, adding that efforts to achieve a deal before the Eurogroup meeting were essentially zero and now pointless.
Greece has one more chance because the final Eurozone meeting will be on Dec. 18 ahead of a meeting of EU leaders that will wrap up work for the year, two weeks before Greece assumes the rotating, powerless, symbolic presidency of the bloc.
The stumbling blocks are a difference of opinion over the size of the budget gap now estimated at 1.2 billion euros and as the Troika of the European Union-International Monetary Fund-European Central Bank (EU-IMF-ECB) says Greece can’t produce a plan how to cover at least half of it, if not all of it.
Another obstacle is what to do about the money-bleeding defense industry EAS which the government wants to operate for at least another year although the Troika wants it downsized or sold off and the workers fired.
Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras reportedly discussed the progress of negotiations with European Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn and International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde as well as the IMF’s envoy to Athens Poul Thomsen during a teleconference call.