Varoufakis tells Irish radio a deal with Greece's lenders 'is more or less done'

“Either there’s a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, the agreement will come in the immediate future. If there’s a ‘yes’ then the Greek government will just sign at the dotted line in the institutions’ proposal from June 25,” the minister told “Morning Ireland” talk show.

He also reiterated that if Greeks say ‘no’, “I can assure you this week we have received some very interesting proposals which arrive confidentially from official Europe and an agreement is more or less done.”

The minister expressed his conviction that Greek banks will open on Monday regardless of the result of the referendum and rejected the idea that a ‘yes’ vote would be the end of main coalition partner SYRIZA, since, as he explained, even if people vote ‘yes’, the party would remain the only credible political party.

He noted Greece wants to pay its debt and fulfill its obligations towards its creditors and that the country wants a logical fiscal policy with reforms which would end the crisis and help repay the debts. Varoufakis also said that bank deposits are safe and that the dead end will be resolved.

Asked whether the government wants a ‘no’ vote to support its failure to achieve an agreement, the minister said: “We didn’t fail, the Eurogroup failed.”

In an opinion piece published earlier on his personal blog, Varoufakis wrote that for the first time, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recognized that, in its fifth review assessment, there was a low probability that Greece’s public debt would prove sustainable.

The minister presents an extract from the IMF’s own report in which it confesses that, to portray Greek public debt as sustainable (without substantial debt relief), its researchers had to make the assumption that “…Greece would go from having the lowest average total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the euro area since it joined the EU in 1981 to having among the highest TFP growth, and that it would go to the highest labor force participation rates and to German employment rates.”

“Pigs would, of course, sooner fly!” Varoufakis commented.

“Never before has a veritable institution advocated policies that clashed so mercilessly with its own research. Never before has the IMF agreed, on economic analysis, with a government it sought to devastate,” he concluded.