The European Central Bank will be allowed to keep private files showing how Greece used derivatives to hide its debt after defeating the first court challenge using the bloc’s freedom of information rules.
“Disclosure of those documents would have undermined the protection of the public interest so far as concerns the economic policy of the European Union and Greece,” the EU General Court in Luxembourg said today, rejecting a request by Bloomberg News initially filed in August 2010. [Yesterday’s] ruling by three judges denies European taxpayers, on the hook for the cost of Greece’s 240 billion-euro ($311 billion) bailout, the opportunity to see whether EU officials knew of irregularities in Greece’s public accounts before they became public in 2009….
“European citizens have the right to know how their money is used to bail out secret financial deals, especially as the European Central Bank takes on more regulatory responsibility for Europe’s banks,” Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler said. “We are disappointed with the court’s ruling to continue the culture of secrecy.”
Disappointed, maybe, but given the institutional secrecy that is the hallmark of the EU, he can hardly be surprised.
An then there’s this:
BRUSSELS—The International Monetary Fund is set to admit to major missteps over the past three years in its handling of the bailout of Greece, the first spark in a debt crisis that spread across Europe. In an internal document marked “strictly confidential,” the IMF said it badly underestimated the damage that its prescriptions of austerity would do to Greece’s economy, which has been mired in recession for years. The IMF said that it bent its own rules to make Greece’s burgeoning debt seem sustainable and that, in retrospect, the country failed on three of the four IMF criteria to qualify for assistance.
“In retrospect”, ah yes.