Germany caps Eurozone bailout liabilities
Germany has capped its liabilities for Eurozone bailouts at €310bn (£265bn), the German finance ministry has said.
This comes amid growing political pressure on chancellor Angela Merkel over exposure of the German taxpayer to funding the rest of the Eurozone in the run up to elections next month.
Finance minister Wolfgang Schauble recently reported that Germany's liability share of Eurozone bailouts so far is €95.3bn. But German newspaper FAZ says this figure does not account to the country's 20 per cent share of the €60bn provided from the European Financial Stabilisation Mechanism in 2010 and bilateral credits to Greece provided via development bank KfW – bringing the real total to around €122bn.
A report in weekly magazine Der Spiegel cited a document from the Bundesbank saying that Greece will need additional resue loans from its European partners by the start of 2014 at the latest.
Despite finance ministry spokesman Martin Kotthaus saying he was not aware of the cited report, the story nonetheless gained a lot of traction in the press and with the public.
This increased the political pressure on Merkel, who had previously just played down the prospect of the likelihood of future bailouts.