Greece debt crisis: government ‘hatched plot’ for drachma return

27 Ιουλ 2015

Greece’s commitment to the euro came under fresh scrutiny yesterday when it emerged that senior government ministers had secretly planned a return to the drachma.


   The disclosure that members of Alexis Tsipras’s cabinet had been plotting to raid central bank reserves - and hack into tax system accounts to create a parallel banking system - underlined the instability in Athens.
   Although Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister, and Panagiotis Lafazanis, the former energy minister, have been sacked, the legacy of their plots have pushed Mr Tsipras into a new bout of turmoil.
   The Greek prime minister likes to portray himself as the captain of a team fighting against EU hardliners such as Wolfgang Schauble, the German finance minister, who want to drive Greece out of the euro. Now it appears that senior figures within his ruling left-wing Syriza party also believed that Greece should prepare to bring back the drachma.
   The revelation illustrates the obstacles facing negotiators from the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund, who are due to start talks in Athens on a third Greek bailout package tomorrow (Tuesday).
   Mr Tsipras and other eurozone leaders may have agreed in principle to the deal - an 86 euros billion loan in return for more austerity - but it has been rejected as unworkable by Mr Schauble and as unfair by many in Syriza.
   Mr Lafazanis gave weight to speculation that the government had a covert plan to go back to the drachma if the talks collapsed when he said that he had proposed a raid on the reserves of the Bank of Greece that would enable pensions and public sector wages to be paid if Greece was pushed out of the euro.
   “The main reason for that was for the Greek economy and Greek people to survive, which is the utmost duty every government has under the constitution,” he said, while denying a reports that he had been prepared to arrest the bank’s governor if he opposed the raid. Mr Lafanazis told his fellow plotters that the Greek mint held about euros 22 billion. Critics said that was wrong and his plan was unrealistic.
   The cloak-and-dagger mood of Greek politics was compounded by a report that Mr Varoufakis had been asked by Mr Tsipras to study the creation of a parallel banking system that would have enabled Greece to switch to the drachma overnight, it said.
Πηγή: theaustralian.com.au
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