Greece raises 4 bn euros in bond sale

Greece raised 4.062.5 billion euros ($5.16 billion) on Tuesday to avert default this week. The fresh funds plug a financing gap left by a stalled EU-IMF loan which risks triggering default later this week. The sale raised 2.762.5 billion euros in one-month treasury bills at an interest rate of 3.95 percent and a further 1.3 billion euros in three-month bills at 4.2 percent. In the last three-month auction in October, the agency had raised 1.625 billion euros at an interest rate of 4.24 percent, while there is no recent comparable one-month offer. But the stakes are higher now. Greece needed the money to repay five billion euros from a prior three-month debt issue that matures on Friday. That treasury bill had been auctioned in August to enable the country to pay state salaries and pensions in the absence of a scheduled loan payment from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Worth 31.2 billion euros overall, the loan payment was supposed to have been disbursed by July but was held back owing to reform delays and protracted political uncertainty after a four-month electoral campaign in Greece. The release of these funds, which are part of Greece's second EU-IMF financial assistance package, is still pending. Tuesday's sale is nearly billion short of the required sum for Friday's treasury bill repayment. But additional non-competitive bills for over 900 million euros are to be tabled by Thursday, the debt management agency said.