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Greece draws 2.925 bln euros from treasury bills sale, as updated proposal for debt deal deemed inefficient

Xinhua, June 10, 2015 Adjust font size:

Greece drew 2.925 billion euros (3.30 billion U.S. dollars) from a new treasury bills sale on Wednesday, as the updated proposal for a debt deal Athens sent to Brussels earlier this week was rejected as insufficient yet again by creditors.

The debt-laden country raised 1.625 billion euros from the auction of six-month bills and an additional 1.3 billion euros from the sale of three-month bills, the public debt management agency PDMA announced.

The interest rates stood at 2.97 percent and 2.7 percent, unchanged from similar auctions last month.

Greece has relied on the monthly treasury bills auction program in recent months to cover its financial obligations domestically and abroad, as international lenders have not released any funds since last summer.

The extension of the second bailout that has kept Greece afloat since 2010 expires on June 30, but after four months of negotiations with European partners and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over a reforms-for-cash deal, the impasse has not been overcome.

"The ball is in Greece's court," Margaritis Schinas, the European Commission spokesman said on Wednesday.

Schinas stressed that the supplementary document Athens submitted in the early hours of Tuesday to EU Commissioner for Economic Affairs Pierre Moscovici did not reflect what was agreed during the meeting of Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels last Wednesday evening.

The lack of progress has fuelled concern over a looming Greek default and Grexit in coming weeks. Greek state coffers have run dry, and at the end of June, Athens needs to pay about 2 billion euros in pensions and salaries to public servants. It is also the deadline to pay back a 1.5-billion-euro loan installment to IMF.

Last Friday, for first time since the start of the Greek debt crisis in late 2009, Greece requested to delay its payments to IMF for a few weeks. It was the also the first time a developed country made such a demand of the funding body. Endit