International Monetary Fund

Finnish Finance Minister Antti Rinne said in a live-streamed interview that he saw "a ray of hope" that an understanding can be reached between eurozone creditors and Greece on Friday.

Brinkmanship is apparently giving way to semantics on Wednesday as Athens and its eurozone creditors scramble to find the right language to seal a crucial deal between the two sides.

Greece's radical government on Wednesday offered debt forgiveness to thousands of individuals and companies that owe the state money, hoping to secure a fraction of arrears.

Junior finance minister Nadia Valavani said debtors offering to pay a minimum of 200 euros upfront could see a haircut of up to 50 percent on the rest of their debt.

Romania has repaid, since the start of this year, over 1.567 billion euros to the International Monetary Fund, European Union and World Bank, in the account of the stand-by loan taken out in 2009, according to data released by the Ministry of Public Finance for AGERPRES.

Photo credit: (c) GABRIEL PETRESCU / AGERPRES ARCHIVE

The Wall Street Journal this week explored the areas of agreement and disagreement between the Greek government and the country's eurozone creditors, making specific reference to the extremely tight deadlines for working out a deal.

Greece is committed to not continuing an international bailout similar to the ones agreed with the EU and IMF by previous governments, its spokesman said on Sunday.

"(Greece) will not continue with a program which has the characteristics of the programs of previous governments,» Gabriel Sakellaridis told Greek TV.

In an article entitled "Final showdown approaches for EU and Greece," Peter Spiegel, the correspondent for the Financial Times in Brussels, presents three possible scenarios with regard to the negotiations between Greece and its creditors, in view of the critical Eurogroup meeting on Monday.

In an interview to the influential German magazine Der Spiegel, Greek FinMin Yanis Varoufakis insists on the need for a debt “haircut” and vilifies the EC-ECB-IMF troika, whose behaviour he equates with CIA waterboarding.

Greece will pay a 340-million-euro tranche to the International Monetary Fund as scheduled on Friday, a government official told Reuters, the second part of a 1.5-billion-euro loan installment due this month.

"Everything is set, the payment will go out later today,» the official said.

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras warned Feb. 12 that his government would not be pressured into breaking promises made to voters in its efforts to resolve a bitter row with the EU over renegotiating the country's bailout.