Prime Minister Joseph Muscat said there was a resolve to do all that was plausible and possible to avert Greece quitting the eurozone.

“It is in nobody’s interest that any one country quit the eurozone but there must be a genuine commitment towards reform,” Dr Muscat said while addressing the second annual symposium on EU-Asia relations in financial services in Hong Kong.

He pointed out that the euro first started as a political and then an economic project. This gave rise to both reassurances and uncertainties, he said.

The main reassurance was that there was a political resolve in seeing the survival of the eurozone and it moving forward. Applying the obvious principles of economic, monetary, financial and fiscal theories to simulate possible scenarios in the face of crisis could be somewhat misleading, he said. The main problem with such a scenario was that political attitudes could change and, even though there were no signs of such changes, this had to be taken in consideration.