Eurozone finance ministers are gathering in Brussels for an emergency meeting with officials from Cyprus, which faces a deadline of Monday to strike a deal on its proposed bailout or be cut off from emergency funding. CCTV's Jack Barton reports that failure to strike a deal would mean the almost immediate collapse of Cyprus's two largest banks and a likely exit from the Euro.

The weather outside the EU headquarters appears as bleak as the tough decisions on Cyprus that will this evening be made inside by finance ministers from all 17 Euro area countries along with the IMF and the bloc's central bank.

The European Commissioner of Economic and Monetary Affairs, Olli Rehn, said, "Unfortunately, the events of recent days have led to a situation where there are no longer any optimal solutions available. Today, there are only hard choices left."

Brussels believes Nicosia can only afford to pay back a 10 billion Euro loan so the country needs to find an additional 6 billion elsewhere.

Attempts last week to borrow the money from Russia, nationalize pension funds and create bonds linked to future gas revenues have all failed.

Officials in Brussels have now made it clear that some account holders are going to have to take a loss on their savings for any deal to work.

European lawmakers insist only savers with more than 100,000 Euros should be levied.

"It has to be the big depositors and big shareholders and managers of the banks concerned who have to pay and not the small bankers and small depositors," said Belgian member of European parliament Guy Verhofstadt.

But time is running out.

"Intensive work and contacts will continue in the coming hours. It is essential that an agreement is reached by the Eurogroup on Sunday evening in Brussels on a financial assistance program for Cyprus. This agreement then needs to be swiftly implemented by Cyprus and its eurozone partners," Olli Rehn said.

A certain degree of irreversible damage has already been done.

As Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, said, "If ever we came to a renewed crisis, people are nervous about whether the Eurozone will hold together, then they will say 'we have seen that deposits are not sacrosanct so perhaps I'd better move them as long as I can'."

So confidence has already been dealt a blow, but things will get much worse if a deal is not reached and the deadline for that deal is today.

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