Bloomberg News filed a lawsuit against the European Central Bank, seeking to make it disclose documents showing how Greece used derivatives to hide its fiscal deficit, according to the news agency.
The lawsuit asks the European Union’s General Court in Luxembourg to overturn a decision by the ECB not to disclose two internal documents drafted for the central bank’s executive board in Frankfurt this year. The notes show how Greece used swaps to hide its borrowings and helped trigger the euro’s sovereign debt crisis, says Bloomberg.
Jean-Claude Trichet, ECB’s President, withheld the documents after the European Union and International Monetary Fund agreed on a 110 billion-euro bailout for Greece.
The documents should go public in order to stop governments from using the derivatives to hide their deficit and show how EU authorities acted on information they had on the swaps, according to the suit, filed by the parent of Bloomberg News, Bloomberg Finance LP.
The EU is dependent “on member states taking an open and transparent approach in relation to their levels of debt,” Bloomberg said in its lawsuit. “If Greece has failed to take such an approach in the past, there is a compelling public interest in relevant information being disclosed.”
An ECB spokeswoman declined to comment on the lawsuit.
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