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BRUSSELS. — Greece’s newly installed finance minister arrived at a crucial meeting of his Eurozone peers yesterday without the new bailout proposal the group had expected to receive, according to a person with direct knowledge of the meeting.

Instead, the Greek official, Euclid Tsakalotos, told a gathering of Eurozone finance ministers that Athens would present a new proposal today, according to this person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the meeting was still underway and the discussions are meant to be private.

But the person said some of the other finance ministers had expressed their frustration at what they considered a further delay by Greece.

The head of the group, Jeroen Dijsselbloem, had been upbeat before the meeting. But like other European officials who said they were willing to listen to the latest Greek bailout proposal, Dijsselbloem he indicated that the onus was on Athens to offer something new and specific.

France and Germany called for an emergency summit meeting of Eurozone leaders to discuss Greece.

“It’s going to be very difficult, but we will await new proposals from the Greek government,” Dijsselbloem said before the meeting of 19 finance ministers, known as the Euro- group.

The apparent setback might do little to persuade Greece’s many critics in the Eurozone that there is any hope of salvaging debt negotiations that broke off nearly two weeks ago, just before Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece called for a public referendum on the issue.

After a referendum, held on Sunday, in which a previous Eurozone bailout offer was rejected over its austerity demands, Greece is trying reach a new arrangement as the government and banks are quickly running out of money. Because its previous international bailout program expired before Athens could receive a loan payout of 7,2 billion euros, or about $7,9 billion, the negotiations for any new aid program are essentially starting from scratch.

That is why even as Dijsselbloem and other European officials — including Prime Minister Manuel Valls of France and the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker — yesterday said they were willing to listen to what the Greek government had to say, they tended to express friendly scepticism.

“Now is the time to get round the table again,” Juncker said in a statement to the European Parliament in Strasbourg, France, alluding to Greece.

“In Europe, there are no simple answers,” he said. “Europe is all about compromise, and this takes time.”

But time is what Greece does not have. And some of the Eurozone finance ministers were openly hostile to the idea of reopening negotiations.

Peter Kazimir, the Slovak finance minister, told reporters before the meeting that “prolonging these debates and discussions would be detrimental to Greece and to the Eurozone as a whole”. He said a near-term promise of debt relief, a central demand by Athens, was a “red line” and “absolutely impossible”.

The German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, long the most outspoken sceptic of Greece’s ability to come up with a workable plan, also rejected the suggestion of debt reduction for Greece, saying it was not allowed under European regulations. As he headed into the meeting, Schäuble insisted that without a new agreement, there would be no financial assistance for Greece, which “fought successfully to reject” such a deal.

“We respect that, but without a programme, there is no way to help Greece within the Eurozone,” Schäuble said.

Asked whether the Greeks could retain the euro currency, Schäuble threw the question back, saying: “You have to ask the Greek government.”

The finance ministers were meeting ahead of an emergency summit meeting of the 19 leaders of Eurozone countries at 7pm in Brussels, including Tsipras. Also expected to attend was Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank, another of Greece’s big creditors. Dijsselbloem was also expected to be at the evening meeting, presumably to report on any progress from the afternoon gathering.

Without a positive progress report from the afternoon session, there might be few prospects for the leaders to reach any sort of agreement with Tsipras.

The Irish finance minister, Michael Noonan, was more positive than some of his peers on the possibility that Greece’s debts could be restructured, and he also appeared to encourage Greece to push that request. Still, no one presumably wants to take the blame for a possible sudden, chaotic Greek departure from the Eurozone. That means that all sides could agree to keep talking even as the crisis reaches new levels of intensity, and even as Greece hurtles towards a deadline — a payment of €3,5 billion to the European Central Bank on July 20 — that most analysts think it cannot miss without leaving the Eurozone. – New York Times.