Greece today raised €1.14 billion in three-month treasury bills in a bid to stave off a damaging default that could be weeks away, the debt management agency said.
The agency said it had accepted nearly the entire amount of €1.138 billion offered by creditors, paying a steady interest rate of 2.7%.
Four months of deadlock between Greece's new Syriza-led government and its EU-IMF creditors over the reforms needed to release a final €7.2 billion in bailout funds has led to concerns Athens is running critically short of cash.
Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis has warned that the country risks running out of cash within two weeks if no deal was reached with its creditors to unlock the last tranche of aid funds.
Around €1.5 billion are due to the IMF in June and then more than €6 billion to the European Central Bank in July and August.
Meanwhile, Greece's economy shrank 0.2% in the first quarter, slipping back into recession as political turmoil put the brakes on a fragile recovery, data showed today.
Greece's economy emerged from a six-year recession last year, but has struggled in recent months as political turbulence returned towards the end of last year and triggered early elections that brought anti-austerity leftists to power.
The contraction between January and March, based on seasonally adjusted data from the statistics service Elstat, followed a 0.4% decline in the final quarter of last year.
That was better than expected, with analysts polled by Reuters forecasting a 0.5% contraction in the quarter.
Year-on-year, seasonally adjusted GDP grew 0.3%, just above the 0.2% expansion projected by analysts but slowing from 1.3%rate in the fourth quarter.
Greece's economic boom of the early 2000s ended with the country sinking into recession after the global credit crunch in 2008.
A subsequent debt crisis and austerity imposed by international lenders who bailed out the country deepened the recession, wiping out a quarter of the economy over six years.
