Both the ruling of the EU general court, blocking an attempt by Bloomberg News to obtain European Central Bank files on how Greece hid the scale of its government debt, and your observation that "the ruling means European taxpayers … will not find out whether EU officials knew of irregularities in Greece's national accounts before they became public in 2009" are surprising, to say the least (Facts on desperate attempt to hide extent of Greece's debt stay secret, 30 November).
The Brussels bureaucracy knew very well before 2009 that several European governments were using the services of private-sector financial institutions to disguise the extent of their budget deficits. In 2005, the then EU monetary affairs commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, announced he was allocating more staff to the task of keeping up with the various tricks, such as interest-rate and currency swaps, employed to reduce the published figures for government borrowing.
In an interview with the Financial Times in October 2005, Almunia claimed that, following the revelation that Greece had provided false data on its government deficit every year since 1998 (sic), progress had been made in cleaning up the data.
Bloomberg might therefore find it useful to turn its attention to what Joaquín Almunia's staff had discovered in the four years prior to the announcement by the new Greek government, in December 2009, that its deficit, as a proportion of GDP, was some three and a half times larger than previously announced.
Paul Rayment
Former director of economic analysis, UN Economic Commission for Europe
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