Washington: Greece will be cut off from additional International Monetary Fund financing if it misses a loan payment to the crisis lender, an IMF spokesman said Thursday.
"Any country that doesn`t meet its commitment with the Fund... is declared in arrears and they have no access to IMF funding," IMF spokesman William Murray said.
But Murray said the IMF believed that Athens would not miss any of the looming payments.
"As we stand here right now, we expect the Greek authorities will pay us," Murray said at a regularly scheduled news conference.
Greece`s interior minister, Nikos Voutsis, said Sunday that heavily indebted Greece had "no money" to make a series of repayments to the IMF that are due beginning June 5, totaling 1.6 billion euros ($1.75 billion).
But Greek officials negotiating to unlock some 7.2 billion euros in bailout cash with creditors -- the IMF, the European Union and the European Central Bank -- have not suggested that a payment would be missed.
The IMF spokesman also said that the Greek government had not asked the the Fund to regroup the payments to give the country a little more time to make them. "There`s been no request for a bundling," he said.
A Greek government spokesman said Thursday that it hopes a deal with official creditors could be reached by Sunday. But the European Commission, the EU executive arm, has downplayed that outcome.
"Talks are continuing with the Greeks but work still needs to be done," Murray said.
