The troika of international lenders „held a gun to the head“ of Cyprus and Portugal and showed little sympathy for social measures, an MEP looking into its work has said.

„Both countries had very little room for manoeuvre in negotiating the terms of the bailouts. What they said basically was that ‚a gun was held to our head‘, especially in Cyprus,“ Juergen Klute, a left-wing German MEP, told this website.