On Wednesday 8 March, the MEP Fabio De Masi (GUE/NGL, Germany) and the former Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, presented the European Parliament with a petition to call on the ECB to publish an external legal opinion that it took as its basis to turn off the money tap keeping the Greek banks alive artificially, at the end of June 2015.
“The ECB was not sure [that this decision] was legal. It commissioned a legal opinion of a private legal firm” to find out whether it was overstepping its mandate, De Masi said. “I asked [ECB President] Draghi for a copy of the legal opinion, but he refused”, he added.
The MEP launched a petition, which has attracted more than 25,000 signatures, including those of two candidates in the French presidential elections, the Socialist Benoît Hamon and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a radical Left candidate. Once the official request has been presented to the ECB, it will have two weeks to make an official response to the request for transparency. If it refuses, De Masi has made it clear that he is prepared to appeal.
Varoufakis said that the Frankfurt-based monetary institute, which has “exorbitant power” to close all the banks of a member state of the Eurozone, is completely dependent on the Eurogroup, the informal body of finance ministers of the Eurozone, which “doesn't exist in the EU treaties”, despite its charter, which states that it is completely independent from political pressure. This exorbitant power with no transparency mechanism runs counter to the basic principles of democracy, he argued.
When asked about his ministerial position at the time of these events (see EUROPE 11345), Varoufakis said that he had signed the death certificate of the Greek banks, but was not the executioner. He added: “on 27 June, the ECB made a decision which ensured that on the following Monday morning, the banks would run out of cash. In other words, that the banks would close. It was a decision of our government that, given the banks would close anyway on the Monday morning because of the decision, that they should not open in the first place to avoid public unrest and making depositors enter branches of banks that had no liquidity”.
At the end of June 2015, the government of Alexis Tsipras, which was engaged in a stand-off with the other Europeans over the continuation of the second Greek bailout plan, announced a referendum on the reforms that Greece was to set in place in exchange for further financial assistance.
De Masi recalled the attitude of the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and of the former President of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, who took the view that a 'no' vote to the reforms was incompatible with Greece remaining in the Eurozone. Now, “we want to know if this was true or not”, by having access to the legal opinion commissioned by the ECB, the MEP stressed.
The petition can be consulted at: https://diem25.org/thegreekfiles/ (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)