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The date, on which Greece will have to repay a loan of almost €1.5 billion to the International Monetary Fund is coming closer, and the government in Athens is facing an uphill task in garnering that amount. If unable to do so, the country will trigger a credit event, although leading ministers in the cabinet of SYRIZA and the Independent Greeks have argued otherwise.

A former representative of the Greek financial institutions has told GRReporter, that not only is a credit event in the Eurozone feasible, but an action plan has already been elaborated should one arise.

In an interview for Radio Real FM, former finance minister Gikas Hardouvelis also voiced his concern: "I am worried by the likelihood of triggering a credit event, because a deficit of €2.4 billion is expected in March. Unless partners allow Greece to issue additional government bonds, covering this gap will be a tall order. We'll have to find money elsewhere and this is what bothers me quite a lot. The reason why the previous cabinet insisted on a quarterly extension of the bailout package was precisely to get the funding before early March. Now the issue is precisely this - being denied access to this money."

For his part, the finance minister, Yannis Varoufakis, told Associated Press, that Athens would repay its debts to the IMF, by saying: "Of course we are going to prioritise our settlements in favour of the IMF. We don't want to be the first country, which fails to meet its commitments to the Fund. If we have to grapple with this situation on our own, we are going to even extract fat from the flies and live up to it. "

The Minister failed to specify what the exact implications of his humorous phrase, ‘fat from the flies’, were, but a few days earlier he had not ruled out the imposition of an extraordinary tax on certain categories of taxpayers. It is not clear at present what threshold of income will trigger paying the tax.

Earlier today, Eurogroup’s President, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, called on Greece to begin implementing its reforms. He pointed out that in return the country would be able to receive a part of the next tranche of the bailout programme within this month. However, his Greek counterpart, Yannis Varoufakis, chose to reply negatively by saying: "We won't take the next tranche, if the price for it is to perpetuate the darkness, in which we are living now."

In an interview for Radio Parapolitika, Varoufakis once again said that today's government had been elected to power precisely to undermine the logic of the ‘crisis that feeds on itself’, and added: "I do not want us to continue applying recession policies."

The Greek finance minister argued: "What they are telling us now is not ‘put the measures into effect or you won't get the tranche.’ What we agreed upon was that we were going to implement the measures we have put forward, and then we were going to be evaluated accordingly."

Varoufakis left open the possibility for a rise in VAT, again without specifying which categories of goods could be affected. The colourful minister restricted himself to the claim that he was going to find some product, very "limited by way of consumption", and leave the basic constituents of the consumer basket unaffected. Once again, he spoke in vague terms about the probability of imposing an additional tax. "If there is one, it will only affect those social groups that shy away from paying their taxes, although they can afford to pay them."

However, if we take a clue from the statements of his party colleague and MP, Yannis Balafas, the truth is rather different. In an interview on the morning show of Skai TV, he said it was "extremely likely" that the government impose extra taxes on alcoholic beverages and tobacco products.

Meanwhile, the IMF presented a report, according to which the claims of the new Greek government members on combating tax evasion and filling the state coffers are unreal. Despite experts’ recommendations, Greece has seen the application of very few measures to that effect subsequent to May 2014; the experts believe this has been due to political interventions prior to the election period.

The IMF regards the Greek authorities in their present state as unable to implement further reforms towards the independence of fiscal policy, mostly because "the implications of fiscal autonomy are completely alien to the Greek governance tradition".