The Street
May 13, 2011
A deal between Goldman Sachs (GS_) and Greece was created to mask the "real" level of the country's debt and regulators would not have allowed it if they had prior knowledge of the agreement, according to a report issued Thursday by Eurostat, the European Commission's statistics arm.
The report says that the Greek government and Goldman inked 13 separate "off-market cross-currency swaps" in 2001 that essentially lowered the Hellenic nation's sovereign debt by EU 2.3 billion ($3.5 billion).
But by using non "spot" market rates, along with a Goldman Sachs' numerous "revisions" to the repayment schedule, the debt was spread over several years and artificially reduced the Greek deficit, the report says.
Although that EU had requested information on the swaps since 2001, the report states that the Greek government did not provide a full accounting until early on 2010.
More
Read the Eurostat Report
No comments:
Post a Comment