In an interview with the Canadian paper “The Globe and Mail”, Greek Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras stressed that the country has moral right to negotiate hard for another debt reduction.

“What we want is recognition of the sacrifices of the people, grave sacrifices in terms of income loss and loss of employment,” the minister said in the article published on Monday.

“The debt is high and we want to lower it to make the annual amortization payments and interest payments lower so resources can go more to growth and investment,” Mr. Stournaras said. “We badly need investment and growth to bring down unemployment. We need to divert resources from debt servicing into growth.”

As the paper notes, Yannis Stournaras would not say, ahead of negotiations with the troika and the Eurogroup due to start in the autumn, how the debt would come down.

While he insisted that there were “many options” to bring down the debt, the paper says, there were really only three big ones: an extension of the debt’s maturities, a reduction in the interest rate or a “haircut”, that is, a write-off of a portion of the debt such as the one in 2012 which reduced Greece’s debt by 50 percent of its GDP.

“We would like to have a contribution in a way that does not hurt our partners, those who are holding our debt,” Mr. Stournaras added.