Varoufakis: Claims of Greek request to print drachmas ‘nonsense’

In comments to Skai, former leftist finance minister Yanis Varoufakis described as "nonsense" claims that, while at the helm of the ministry in 2015, he had lodged a request with Moscow to print drachmas for Greece.  

"No way, that's nonsense," Varoufakis, who now leads the party MeRA25, told Skai, while admitting however that the leftist administration he was part of had a "Plan B" in place. 

"Of course there needed to be a Plan B and there was one," he said. "The Plan B was about what you do if you need to go to Grexit, because it wasn't us that wanted Grexit. It was Schaeuble that talked about that," Varoufakis said, referring to the former German finance minister.

Questioned about the claim, made in a biography about French president Francois Hollande, regarding an alleged request to Moscow to print drachmas, Varoufakis said that Hollande "lied very often with one aim: to change his own image."

"He made two or three attempts to help us, that's true, as did Moscovici and Juncker," Varoufakis said, referring to European Economy Affairs Commissioner and former European Commission President. "My worst mom,ents in Brussels where when Hollande, Juncker and Moscovici tried to help us because that's when Schaeuble would get angry and become even tougher," he added. 

As for whether former prime minister Alexis Tsipras asked for funds from Russia, Varoufakis said that, "the discussions between Tsipras and Putin about natural gas pipelines had been based on the exchange of a down payments of several billions, about 5 or 6 from what I heard."