Greece’s parliament will convene for an emergency session to ratify the text of a new multibillion-euro bailout, according to the parliament website, but the timing of the crucial vote remained uncertain and doubts persisted about whether the deal enjoyed the full support of all EU capitals.
It was not clear when MPs, recalled from their summer recess on Tuesday by prime minister Alexis Tsipras, would begin discussing the 400-page bill at committee level, with reports suggesting that parliamentary committees would probably not meet until Thursday morning, hours before the plenary debate and a vote now likely to take place in the early hours of Friday.
Tsipras called for parliament to reconvene after the government reached an outline agreement with its creditors early on Tuesday on an €85bn (£61bn) package aimed at saving the debt-stricken country from bankruptcy and securing its future in the euro.
The government wants parliament to ratify the bailout, Greece’s third in five years, so it can be approved by eurozone finance ministers at a meeting planned for Friday – allowing a vital first tranche to be disbursed in time for a major €3.4bn debt payment Athens is due to make to the European Central Bank on 20 August.
