Greece made a crucial payment to the International Monetary Fund and won extra emergency lending for its banks yesterday but it remained unclear whether Athens can satisfy sceptical creditors on economic reforms before it runs out of money.

Eurozone partners gave Greece six working days to improve a package of proposed reforms in time for finance ministers of the currency bloc to consider whether to release more funds to keep the country afloat when they meet on April 24.

After weeks of contradictory statements, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis announced that Athens was resuming the sale of state assets halted when a leftist-led government was elected in January, but would do so on different terms.

“We are restarting the privatisation process as a programme making rational use of existing public assets,” Varoufakis told a conference in Paris. “What we are saying is the Greek state does not have the capacity to develop public assets.”

He did not specify which tenders would go ahead and said the government wanted public-private joint ventures with a minimum investment commitment required from bidders, and the state retaining a stake to generate pension funds.

A government official confirmed Greece had transferred the €450 million loan repayment to the IMF, reassuring financial markets after earlier doubts about whether it had money to redeem the debt and pay wages and pensions.

EU officials said the Greek delegate made an urgent plea for cash at a meeting of deputy finance ministers in Brussels on Wednesday evening but was told there must first be progress on a stalled list of measures to make public finances sustainable.

“From the Greek side there was a strong statement that liquidity is getting really bad and there was an appeal to release some type of liquidity support before the eurozone finance ministers’ meeting on April 24,” a eurozone aide said.

“But no one knows how this could be done – there is no willingness to provide support before there is some progress in terms of the reform programme,” the official said.

In a small short-term boost, the European Central Bank agreed to increase the ceiling on emergency lending assistance to Greek banks by €1.2 billion to €73.2 billion, a banking source said. The ECB is reviewing the limit weekly while eurozone negotiations continue.

Leftist Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, elected on a promise to end austerity, is balking at politically sensitive reforms of the pension system and labour markets to which his conservative predecessor had agreed. EU sources said Brussels was pushing Athens towards more rapidly applicable measures to liberalise product and service markets instead.

Greece’s creditors – the eurozone and the IMF – are using the leverage provided by its acute cash predicament to press for those measures to be implemented. (Reuters)

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