Fabio de Masi on the ECB's intimidation tactics and why it matters
Channel: DiEM25
Date: 2023-01-12

Former German MP and MEP Fabio de Masi who helped us take the ECB to court over #TheGreekFiles, explains why their attempt to intimidate us with a charge of close to €20,000 in “legal fees” matters.

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In 2015, the European Central Bank (ECB) forced Greece’s banks to close as part of the Troika’s attempt to intimidate the newly-elected Greek government into abandoning what it had been voted in to do: renegotiate the country’s public debt, fiscal policy and reform agenda.

We know the ECB commissioned a legal opinion on the legality of those actions. And we want to see that opinion, but the ECB refuses to make it public.

The ECB has the exorbitant power to close down a Eurozone country’s banks. Exercising this power with decisions made behind closed doors by unelected officials is inconsistent with European democracy.

The least Europeans can expect is access to legal opinions that they have paid for regarding the exercise of the ECB’s power. In 2017, Yanis Varoufakis (DiEM25 / MeRA25 Greece) – Greece’s finance minister at the time the opinion was commissioned – and then-MEP Fabio de Masi (GUE/NGL), supported by a broad alliance of politicians and academics, filed a mass freedom of information request to the ECB to get this opinion. When they refused to release it on “confidentiality grounds”, we took them to the European courts.

To this day, the ECB hasn’t made that legal opinion public. Not only that – it is now demanding over €20.000 in legal fees from us, as a clear warning to anyone who dares request information that should be accessible to all Europeans in the first place.

We won’t be intimidated: our response is to renew our call for the ECB to release #TheGreekFiles!

By signing our petition, you are helping us put a simple question to the ECB: if you acted legally, why don’t you release the legal opinion regarding your actions?

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