Mercurial one-time Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis again made headlines over the weekend by charging that German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not have a plan to deal with the Greek crisis and that he was "never a friend” with Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras.

 

Moreover, in an interview published in the Sunday edition of the German mass daily “Welt”, he claimed that “he (Tsipras) did not adhere to the agreement we had”.

 

Varoufakis was finance minister in the radical leftist Tsipras government for nearly six months in the first half of 2015, a period marked by combative and ultimately inconclusive negotiations between Athens and its institutional creditors, quickly followed by a snap referendum on lenders’ terms at the time, a bank holiday and unprecedented capital controls – something Varoufakis had publicly dismissed only hours earlier as impossible within the common currency area.

 

In his latest bid to shed a more positive light on his participation in the failed negotiations and subsequent acquiescence of the Tsipras government to a third bailout agreement, i.e. memorandum, Varoufakis insisted that “never before that there been an elected (as a parliament deputy) finance minister of a bankrupt country who would have said ‘no’ to creditors. But when someone is bankrupt, they cannot escape from this situation paying off old loans with new loans … Today, Greece is more bankrupt than ever,” he said, adding: “Tsipras did not did not adhere to the agreement we had”.

 

The "agreement", according to the media-savvy Greek economist, was based on opposition to a policy of spending cuts forced on Greece, as well as what he called the EU's austerity policy. Varoufakis claimed that he tried to criticize what he called the "defective structure" of the eurozone and demand its reform, "without an exit (Grexit) from it". He then charged that Tsipras eventually caved in, signing agreements "which foresaw the exact opposite of what we wanted to change."