Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis have been meeting with senior officials across Europe in recent days seeking support for a new agreement on Greece's debt to end five years of austerity.

Following talks in Brussels yesterday with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, Tsipras said there was no agreement yet, but that talks were going in the right direction, while Varoufakis noted he was "encouraged about the future" following yesterday’s talks in Frankfurt with the president of European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, with whom he discussed support for Greek banks.

In an interview with German newspaper Zeit ahead of his meeting with German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble in Berlin this morning, Varoufakis promised that Greece will "never again" have a budget deficit and tried to reassure Germany that Athens' new policies did not in any way mean it was turning its back on reform.

Varoufakis also told Italian paper La Repubblica that Greece has begun talks with the IMF over its plan to swap existing government debt for growth-linked bonds, noting his optimism that the Greek debt problem would be solved.

In a statement following the ECB’s decision last night to stop accepting Greek government bonds as collateral, the Greek Finance Ministry notes that the ECB is thus “putting pressure on the Eurogroup to move quickly to seal a new mutually beneficial deal between Greece and its partners“ indicating that the central bank’s decision would not change the government’s negotiating strategy.