ESM's Regling says confident IMF will participate in Greek programme

[LJUBLJANA] The head of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) Klaus Regling said he was confident the International Monetary Fund would participate in the third aid programme to Greece.

The IMF has yet to make clear if it will participate in the new bailout, having argued in favour of a partial writedown of Greece's debt burden which it considers unsustainable in its current form.

"It has not been defined to what extent the IMF will contribute but I'm confident that they will participate later this year," Mr Regling, boss of the eurozone's permanent bailout fund, told a conference in Ljubljana.

In the first two programmes, which lasted from 2010 until the end of June, the IMF loaned 31.8 billion euros to Greece out of the total joint value of the two programmes of 226.5 billion euros.

Mr Regling said that although the share of IMF in help to Greece is declining the IMF "will never get out completely" of helping EU states because EU states are its members.

He also pointed out that the IMF extended more help to EU states in the past five years than to all other world countries combined.

Mr Regling said that he was confident that monetary union in the euro zone could work well without full fiscal union. "I don't think we need to go a lot further for a good functioning of the eurozone area," he said.

REUTERS