Stournaras Warns on Measures as Tsipras Defiant on Pensions

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In addition to pension reform, creditors also asking Greece to implement more belt-tightening in order to meet an agreed primary surplus target of 3.5 percent of GDP, excluding interest payments, by 2018. According to Greece's finance minister Euclid Tsakalotos, the International Monetary Fund isn't convinced how the country will meet this target. The IMF doubts the efficiency of some measures already adopted and is more pessimistic on its assumptions about the Greek economy, Tsakalotos said in an interview also published Saturday in Kathimerini.

Greece has covered 75 percent of the fiscal consolidation required to make its debt sustainable, Stournaras said. If it wasn't for the "backtracking" of the first half of 2015, 85 percent of the distance would have been covered by now, according to Stournaras, who also served as Finance Minister in the previous conservative government led by Antonis Samaras. "Today, a new backtracking is unthinkable," he said.