by Magda Panoutsopoulou
ANKARA
After a teleconference meeting on Wednesday, the Eurogroup ministers decided to ignore the Greek government call to "stay at the negotiating table" -- the group ruled that there would be no further negotiations until after the referendum on the bailout to be held in Greece on Sunday.
The Eurogroup may have reacted to Greek Prime Minister AlexisTsipras speech on television on Wednesday, in which he told the Greeks that the referendum would still be held on Sunday, and that Greece would get a better deal as a result.
Tsipras stressed that the government still aimed for an agreement with creditors and "remains at the negotiating table."
He said that holding the referendum was not actually about Greece staying in the euro system.
He called on the Greek people to vote 'no' saying it represented the people's choice on how they want to live in the days after the referendum, and a return to European values, as well as strong pressure for a sustainable and fairer agreement.
“No doesn’t mean a rupture with Europe but a return to Europe,” Tsipras insisted.
The Greek government’s intention is to achieve an agreement with the country’s lenders he added.
He also noted that "after the announcement of a referendum for Sunday, better proposals were tabled by the creditors than the ones the country had initially been offered.
But he assured Greeks that, if the Eurogroup has a “positive conclusion, we will respond immediately.”
Earlier, Tsipras wrote a letter, leaked to the Financial Times, to eurozone government heads, accepting most of the terms of the creditors' latest bailout offer made on Saturday.
The letter was leaked after Greece defaulted on its obligations to the International Monetary Fund -- the first developed country to ever do so -- and after the 2010 bailout had already ended.
Tsipras was also asking for a new bailout worth €29.1 billion ($32.4 billion).
