ECB’s Draghi lends support to under-fire BoG chief Stournaras

Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stournaras is a trusted member of the European Central Bank’s Governing Council who has worked hard for Greece’s benefit, ECB head Mario Draghi said on Monday in response to a question at the European Parliament about the probe into the Greek central banker in connection with the alleged leaking of the conclusions on Piraeus Bank and Attica Bank.

The probe comes after successive press reports against Stournaras and his wife. Responding to a Sunday newspaper report about his property declarations, Stournaras stated: “There is no inaccuracy in my property declarations for 2012 or 2013 as the report suggested, or later. It is known that this newspaper is constantly and persistently preoccupied with me and my family. It is no coincidence the newspaper was published a few weeks after the measures for transparency and corporate governance the Bank of Greece took for a specific non-systemic bank in September 2016.”

On September 15, 2016, shortly after the BoG’s Monitoring Department held a scheduled meeting to review the new management of Attica Bank, on which the view of the central bank was negative, the anti-corruption prosecutors stormed the office of Stournaras’s wife.