European Union finance ministers, meeting in Brussels for a two-day session of the Ecofin council, added their voices to the chorus asking Greece to stick rigidly to the recovery plan endorsed earlier in February by the European Commission.

In a statement on February 16, enumerating Greece's previous failings in meeting euro zone benchmarks, public finance statistics reporting and heeding the past recommendations made by Ecofin, the council said it accepted the recovery plan, which envisions cutting the budget deficit by four percentage points to 8.7 per cent in 2010 and bringing it under bringing the deficit under three per cent in 2012 at the latest.

Ecofin asked Greece to present a report by March 16 setting out the timetable for implementing budgetary target measures for 2010, and another by May 15 outlining the policy measures needed to comply with the Ecofin decision.

Missing from the statement was any mention of what aid Athens could expect from the bloc. On February 11, European Council president Herman van Rompuy said that the 16 eurozone member countries "will take determined and coordinated action if needed to safeguard stability in the euro zone as a whole".

The deal, reportedly secured backing from France and Germany in advance of the informal summit of EU leaders hosted by Van Rompuy, but did not stipulate how and when aid would be provided. It was expected that the Ecofin meeting would answer that question.

But remarks from finance ministers attending the council meeting showed that not all were persuaded by the plan.

Among the backers was Spanish finance minister Elena Salgado, saying "Greece has all our support. I am fully confident they will do what is necessary," as quoted by Reuters. Spain's public finances, while not in as perilous a state as Greece's, have caused worries that Madrid could be the next EU capital to seek aid from fellow euro area members.

But Salgado's Austrian counterpart, Josef Proell, was less adamant on the issue of effectively bailing out Athens: "(Potential) aid measures must first be agreed [...] We are at the beginning of the debate. The pressure on Greece to consider further measures by March 16 has clearly increased. We will surely not relax the pressure."

Sweden's finance minister Anders Borg was even more forthright: "If they want to build credibility in the market, they must surpass expectations and they have not done that so far."

He went on to soften the blow, however, saying: "For us, it is not the right thing to say that we rule out common European support efforts to strengthen credibility of the Greek economy."

The issue of Greek public finances overshadowed the other major topics on the agenda, which included the excessive deficit infringement procedures against Lithuania, Malta, Romania, Latvia, Hungary and Poland, but also the US plans to ban proprietary trading at some banks, dubbed the "Volcker rule".

The Ecofin council also formally endorsed the nomination of Portuguese central bank governor Vítor Constâncio for vice-president of the European Central Bank, to succeed Lucas Papademos, whose term of office expires on May 31.