Jeroen Dijsselbloem

The Eurogroup on Monday gave a conditional go-ahead for the release of 6.7 billion euros to Greece and for the start of technical talks for debt relief after the other 18 eurozone finance ministers said on Monday that the country had implemented almost all the prior actions to conclude the third review of its third bailout.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem said on Friday in an interview with the Financial Times that it was not mainly Germany that wanted to see Greece out of the eurozone in 2015.

The eurozone has given Athens a Wednesday deadline to complete the 50 remaining milestones for the third bailout review, after which Athens expects to receive a tranche of 4.5 billion euros, lowering earlier expectations of up to 7.5 billion euros.

Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who on Friday steps down as eurogroup chief, has said he never backed the idea of a Greek exit from the euro.

In an interview with the Financial Times published Friday, Dijsselbloem said a Greek exit from the euro area, intensely speculated in 2015, would have been "really damaging" and a "huge mistake."

The government on Monday sought to appear upbeat about the agreement it reached with the country's creditors over the weekend, and which was approved by eurozone finance ministers earlier in the day, but the atmosphere within leftist SYRIZA is tense as dozens of reforms must be legislated in the coming weeks, some of them contentious.

Eurozone finance ministers meeting in Brussels have approved a staff-level agreement (SLA) between Greece's government and representatives of the country's creditor institutions reached on Saturday, sources have told Kathimerini.

The finance ministers from the 19 countries that use the euro are deciding who should lead their regular meetings, with Portugal's Mario Centeno widely tipped to take the helm of a group that has led the currency bloc's crisis-fighting efforts.

Outgoing Eurogroup chief Jeroen Dijsselbloem has welcomed a staff-level agreement (SLA) between Greece's government and representatives of the country's creditor institutions reached on Saturday.

"It was quite exceptional," that the agreement was reached in time, said Dijsselbloem in Brussels ahead of his last eurogroup meeting. "Today we will discuss the following steps," he added.

Finance ministers from Latvia, Luxembourg, Portugal and Slovakia bid on Thursday to replace Jeroen Dijsselbloem as the head of the eurozone finance ministers, the Eurogroup, before a vote next week among the 19 countries sharing the euro.

A spokesman for the German Finance Ministry declined to comment on Monday on possible alternative uses for unused credits for Greece after the eurozone bailout fund's head suggested left-over credit could be allocated to other purposes.