Greece offered some concessions on Friday on reforms demanded by international lenders in return for new funding before Athens runs out of money, but euro zone creditors said negotiations needed to speed up to get a deal by June, Reuters reported. After talks with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday in Brussels, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras said he wanted a deal by the end of this month. Merkel, in a comment seen as underlining the determination of Europe's main paymaster to keep Greece in the euro zone, said "everything must be undertaken to prevent" Athens running out of cash. In a blog published as euro zone finance ministers met in Riga to assess progress on a reform-for-cash package to ward off a Greek default, Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis agreed to some of the lenders' conditions, still declaring that the euro zone must drop "an approach that has failed". "The current disagreements with our partners are not unbridgeable," Varoufakis wrote in the blog, saying that he was open to some privatisations and an independent tax commission. He rejected any more wage or pension cuts and said he wanted leeway on the government's primary budget surplus targets.
