by Our Foreign Desk

GREECE asked for a three-year loan from the eurozone bailout fund yesterday, promising “reforms” as early as Monday.

Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called again for the economic freedom to allow his country’s economy to recover and to pay off its debts of more than €300 billion (£215bn).

“We need to ensure the medium-term funding of our country with a development and growth programme,” he told the European Parliament yesterday morning.

Athens has written to the Luxembourg-based European Stability Mechanism — the bailout fund for the 19-nation eurozone — saying that it would “immediately implement a set of measures as early as the beginning of next week.”

The measures include changes to taxation and pension cuts, details of which would be presented by today at the latest.

Mr Tsipras’s Syriza government said its aim was to regain “full and affordable market financing to meet its future funding requirements as well as sustainable economic and financial situation” by the end of the three-year loan agreement.

Austerity measures imposed by EU and International ­Monetary Fund creditors on previous Greek governments since 2010 have crippled the country’s economy and impoverished citizens, deepening Greece’s debt crisis rather than alleviating it.

EU leaders threatened to boot Greece out of the eurozone if Mr Tsipras did not agree to further cuts.

“We have a Grexit scenario prepared in detail,” said European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.