Greece Exclusive: Tsipras To Fire Bank Of Greece Boss For ‘undermining Syriza Position’

Syriza aims smoking gun at Central Bank Governor

Former Nia Demokrita Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras asked to leave BoG

Sources within Athens media and finance told The Slog last night that Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras will be quitting his post today (Sunday). Alexis Tsipras will ask for his resignation in the light of documentary proof that the former New Democracy Finance Minister personally gave specific briefs to a top journalist about “putting the most negative spin possible on the news” about Greek finances.

Influential Greeks have long suspected that Troika sympathisers in the banking system were working in close-knit coordination with the creditors to destabilise the Syriza government led by Alexis Tsipras and Yanis Varoufakis. But the smoking gun apparently emerged last week in the shape of briefing documents from the central bank’s Governor to “a leading influential Greek journalist”.

The Slog has posted before about coordinated withdrawals from Athenian banks, and high net worth customers being encouraged to withdraw funds soon after the Syriza election victory. This case, however, is infinitely more insidious because it potentially opens up a trail of deliberate destabilisation and dirty tricks all the way back to Brussels, Berlin….and Washington.

1. YannisStournaris was the Greek Minister of Finance from 5 July 2012 until he moved to the BoG last year. It is unlikely bordering on unthinkable that senior New Democracy colleagues didn’t have any idea this briefing was going on.

2. As a senior consultant to the BoG, he was personally involved in the entry of Greece into the euro. This is now widely known to have involved corruption on a grand scale. So Stournaras has every motive for urgently destabilising the government now investigating all aspects of EMU and Greek debt.

3. Stouranaras is a senior Governor who sits on the Board of the IMF. This gives him a serious conflict of interest….but also ready access to Christine Lagarde should he need it.

4. His media ‘order-taker’ (who is known to the Athenian cognoscenti) regularly passes these briefings on to a number of neoliberal global publications…notably Reuters.

Meanwhile, the forensic investigation into debt overstatement in 2010 and how much Greek debt can be objectively defined as ‘odious’ continues.

Hat-tip to Archie X for giving me the lead on this exclusive.

The Slog would like to thank all senior members of the Eurobnoxious tendency in the British Labour Party for its unstinting support of the Greeks, and virile attacks on the bullying control freaks of Brussels-am-Berlin. It will stand forever as a beacon of apathy among progressives in the UK, and got the reward it so richly deserved in last Thursday’s British General Election.

Yesterday at The Slog: The British Left’s myopic ideologues

Filed under: Uncategorized Tagged: Christine Lagarde, Dirty tricks, IMF, Mario Draghi, Syriza aims smoking gun at Central Bank Governor, Yannis Stournaras