Last night, the Greek government invoked an obscure clause from the 1970s to get out of a €305m debt repayment to the International Monetary Fund.
Rather than pay up today, Athens has chosen to settle its debts for June – €1.5bn – in a lump sum at the end of the month.
The country is technically within its rights, says Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The Daily Telegraph. But “it is the first time that a developed country has ever missed a payment to the IMF since the creation of Bretton Woods institutions [of which the IMF is one] at the end of the Second World War.”
That gives Greece the dubious honour of being the first developed country in over 70 years to miss an IMF payment.
But who else has stuck two fingers up at one of the world’s most respected financial institutions?
Zambia
Zambia is the only other country to ever use this arcane ‘bundling clause’, which it invoked in order to combine its IMF repayments in the 1980s.
It didn’t end well. Struggling to service over $800m in debt arrears, and forced by the IMF to abandon subsidised food prices and devalue its currency, the country was wracked by urban riots and strikes in the middle of the decade.
Its funding agreement with the IMF fell apart in 1987.
Argentina
Argentina is as famous for debt crises as it is for football teams and fine wine.
Most famous of all was the crisis of the early 2000s, when South America’s second-largest economy defaulted on around $100bn in external debt.
In 2003, it defaulted on a $2.9bn IMF payment – though the IMF ultimately made some concessions and a debt restructure was agreed.
Zimbabwe
One of three countries currently in arrears to the IMF at the end of May 2015 (alongside Sudan and Somalia), Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe currently owes just under $80m.
Last September, the IMF sent Zimbabwe a stark ultimatum – catch up with overdue payments or you’re not getting any more money.
Sudan
Out of all countries currently in arrears with the IMF, Sudan has the highest debt pile –$975m.
Sudan has been in arrears on its payments to IMF since 1984 (on debt going back to the 1970s), making it one of the IMF’s oldest borrowers – and in 1986 the country was declared ineligible to receive any more cash.
Cuba
Cuba was one of the IMF’s 40 founding members, and “played a positive role in the Fund for the next 12 years”, according to James M Boughton, former historian at the IMF.
But when Fidel Castro seized power in 1959, repayment of IMF loans taken out under the previous Batista government was repeatedly postponed and interest racked up – until a full five years later, 1964, when Cuba decided to give up its IMF membership.
Was that it for Cuba’s debt repayments? Not exactly. Castro’s government went on to pay off the country’s entire IMF debt – including all interest charges.