Wednesday’s mass sell-off of bank shares at the Athens Stock Exchange (ATHEX) generated a decision by Greece’s capital market commission, a day later, to investigate the possibility of short-selling manipulation.
In radio comments on Thursday, the president of the Hellenic Capital Market Commission, Charalampos Gotsis, referred to “certain transactions (on Wednesday), which to a large degree weren’t justified by some specific extraordinary and major incident.
His statement included an element of certain government claims, reproduced in much of the pro-government press in Athens a day later, namely, of “profiteering”, “political interventions” and “short-selling” as causing the ATHEX’s banking index to drop by 14.83 percent. Finance ministry sources quoted later on Wednesday evening, dubbed “Black Wednesday” by some analysts, even pointed to a Bloomberg article on Piraeus Bank as generating an “over-reaction”.
Gotsis, nevertheless, added that “we cannot adopt any scenario if we do not see the final results of the investigation … at the moment we’re conducting a review to ascertain whether there are indications of manipulation through short-selling”.
