The relationship between the government and the governor of the Bank of Greece has soured further, with administration officials launching direct attacks on Yannis Stournaras who served as Finance Minister under the previous coalition government before being named the head of the country’s central bank.
Some within SYRIZA see Yannis Stournaras as an agent of the opposition who has sought to frustrate the government’s plans and undermine its negotiating position.
In a recent article in the left leaning Efimerida Ton Syntakton, the newspaper accused officials of the Bank of Greece of waging a campaign to actively discredit the government by providing journalists with damaging information giving a skewed image of the economy.
Among those accused of playing a role in the supposed conspiracy include this site. Read the TheTOC’s response here.
At the center of the accusation was an email allegedly sent by an Bank of Greece official to a journalist with information about the course of the economy of SYRIZA’s first 100 days.
Efimerida ton Syntakton also implied that the campaign was being waged with Stournaras’s blessing. Following the release of the article the government released a non paper calling on the Bank of Greece to investigate the matter.
In a statement the Bank of Greece denied that the email had any connection to Stournaras or the official communications department.
Clash intensifies
Today the ‘Avgi newspaper,’ which is affiliated with the SYRIZA party featured a front page article under the headline ‘Stournaras is answerable’ in which it describes the Bank of Greece as operating as an ‘organ against the government’. The article speculates that Stournaras, ‘possibly has not gotten over his previous role as Samaras and Venizelos’s minister’.
The paper, citing the email in question – argues that the Bank of Greece was selecting economic data in order to portray an image of economic ‘collapse’ as the negotiations remain open between the government and the lenders (the supposedly cherry picked information included data such as the amount of money Greeks have withdrawn from banks and the amount of European structural funds not absorbed – the veracity of which has not been questioned).
According to sources, if tomorrow’s ECB meeting is negative for Greece, the government may seek to cast the blame on Stournaras, perhaps even demanding his resignation.
According to the German newspaper Handelsblatt this is part of a wider plan on the part of the government to install an individual loyal to SYRIZA in the central bank. The paper writes in an article titled ‘Tsipras attacks his central banker’ that ‘Tsipras wants to replace Stournaras with a person he trusts at the head of the Bank of Greece’.
‘Undermining the government’
In an interview on the pro-SYRIZA radio station ‘Sto Kokkino’, the parliamentary spokesperson of the party, Nikos Filis, said openly that, ‘there is a problem with Yannis Stournaras, as it appears that he is undermining the negotiations of the country and operating as a political opponent, beyond his competencies as the Governor of the BoG’. He went on to add that, ‘it is not right for the head banker of the country, in the framework of the tough negotiations to undermine, effectively, the government, operating as the opposition.’
LaGarde informed us, not Stournaras
Dimitris Vitsas, the former party secretary struck a similar note in an interview on Athens 9,84 when he maintained that, ‘The Greek government was informed of the existence of the account of 700 million euros in April from Christine Lagarde and not by the Governor of the Bank of Greece who informed us of it after we obtained the information from abroad.’
Vitsas was referring to the emergency fund held by Greece with the IMF of which the country used 650 million euros to help pay off a debt payment of 750 million euros to the IMF that was due today.
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