ECB Asks Court to Bar Greek Swap Disclosure, Cites Market-Disruption Risks
The European Central Bank asked the European Union’s General Court to dismiss a lawsuit seeking the disclosure of documents showing how Greece used derivatives to hide loans and triggered the region’s sovereign debt crisis.
The ECB has complete discretion to decide what it should publish in the public interest, according to its defense to a lawsuit filed by Bloomberg News. Releasing the papers could damage the commercial interests of the ECB’s counterparties, hurt the region’s banks and markets, and undermine the economic policy of Greece and the EU, the central bank said.
The documents don’t “provide information that would assist in informing the public debate in any meaningful manner,” the ECB said in its lawsuit. The files “contain ECB’s staff assumptions and hypotheses which were intended to feed the internal deliberations,” the ECB said in papers served today. The notes “were as such made on the basis of partial elements available at the time and not fully accurate information.”
ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet is withholding the documents as EU finance chiefs prepare to meet next week to discuss additional support for Greece, which received a 110 billion-euro bailout ($155 billion) last year. More than four in five institutional investors say Greece will probably default on its debt, according to a Bloomberg Global Poll published today.
The documents should also be protected to safeguard the effectiveness of the ECB decision-making process, the central bank said. The ECB also challenged the Bloomberg suit on technical grounds. The suit, which is based on the EU’s freedom of information rules, was filed in Luxembourg in December. It requested access to two internal papers drafted for the central bank’s six-member executive board in Frankfurt last year.
‘More Accountability’
“Greater transparency results in more accountability, and the investing public has the right to know more about the roots of Europe’s sovereign debt crisis,” said Matthew Winkler, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. The company intends to file a response.
Eurostat, the EU’s statistics office, last year provided sufficient information on its doubts about the impact of swaps on Greece’s debt, allowing the public to form their own opinion, the ECB said in its filing. The off-market swaps, which Greece hadn’t previously disclosed as debt, let the country increase borrowings by 5.3 billion euros, Eurostat said in November.
To contact the reporters on this story: Elisa Martinuzzi in Milan at emartinuzzi@bloomberg.net; Gabi Thesing in London at gthesing@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Edward Evans at eevans3@bloomberg.net
Rate These Stories
Rate this Page