Spain not looking for eurozone to buy its bonds

Spain will not ask the eurozone to use its emergency rescue fund to buy up its government bonds and so ease high borrowing costs, the head of the treasury said in comments published Monday. "It is not on Spain's agenda to ask for help from the fund and to ask that it buy debt. Far from it," treasury head Inigo Fernandez de Mesa was quoted as saying by Spanish financial daily Expansion. "This has not happened and I can assure you that it is not going to." In comments published Sunday, the leader of the Eurogroup of eurozone finance ministers Jean-Claude Juncker indicated they were ready to let the European Financial Stability Facility (EFSF) buy sovereign debt on secondary markets to ease pressure. In an interview with French daily Le Figaro, Juncker said the EFSF would act alongside the European Central Bank in any such move. The European Commission has not received any "request from a member state" for the EFSF to buy debt," European Commission spokesman Antoine Colombani told a regular news briefing in Brussels when asked about the report. The president of the ECB, Mario Draghi, last week calmed anxieties about Spain's financial stability by vowing the central bank would "do whatever it takes to preserve the euro." That was largely taken to mean the ECB would ease eurozone credit conditions by buying up sovereign bonds or by making cheap loans. For Spain to receive loans from the rescue facility, it would have to present a formal demand, which it has so far refused to do so as to avoid any suggestion it needed a bailout. Mounting concerns over Spain's financial stability have raised fears that the country may need a full international rescue, especially after eurozone leaders agreed to a Spanish bank rescue package worth up to 100 billion euros. Spanish government spokeswoman Soraya Saenz de Santamaria insisted again on Friday that "a bailout is not an option." The rate of return on Spain's benchmark sovereign bonds, a key indicator of financial viability, last week reached dangerous levels above 7.5 percent but came down sharply below the 7.0 percent line after Draghi's comments. Despite the improvement, the yield was still above 6.5 percent on Monday, a level considered unsustainable in the long term. Fernandez insisted to Expansion that the spike in borrowing costs "does not reflect the fundamentals of the Spanish economy. "It should therefore not take long to correct itself," he added. The next key test of confidence in Spain comes on Thursday when it holds an auction of debt including the key 10-year bonds. Fernandez said Spain had so far carried out 68 percent of its planned borrowing for 2012.