Government sources railed, unofficially, against Bank of Greece Gov. Yannis Stournaras on Thursday afternoon, hours after the country’s central bank issued an interim report on monetary policy that welcomed the prospect of a precautionary support program after the end of the current bailout in August 2018.
Stournaras, a former finance minister in the previous Samaras coalition government, has long a “thorn” in the side of the leftist-rightist coalitoin government that rode to power on an anti-austerity, anti-bailout mandate in January 2015.
Government sources criticized the BoG governor for the report, which they claimed supports another post-bailout support mechanism instead of a venture in capital markets with favorable interest rates.
Moreover, the unofficial line from the government side referred to a past “failure” by Stournaras and the ND-PASOK coalition government in which he was the powerful finance minister, saying the current government is not doomed to repeat such failure but can do “much better”.
Stournaras remained at his influential post at the independent central bank even after the Tsipras government signed a painful third memorandum bailout with creditors in the summer of 2015, after six months of shambolic negotiations climaxed with the imposition of capital controls in late June and the holding of a controversial referendum in early July 2015 on whether or not to accept creditors’ previous and more-or-less withdrawn offer.
A resounding “no” vote in the referendum led to emergency negotiations with creditors and an ultimate “yes” by the Tsipras coalition government at the time.
