The EU's general court has blocked an attempt to force the European Central Bank to release files showing how Greece used derivatives to hide its debt in the run-up to the financial crisis. The case was brought by Bloomberg News under the EU's freedom of information rules in August 2010 but was thrown out on Thursday by the court in Luxembourg.
"Disclosure of those documents would have undermined the protection of the public interest so far as concerns the economic policy of the EU and Greece," the EU's general court said. Goldman Sachs and other investment banks have been criticised by European leaders over claims that they helped Greece disguise the true scale of its debts over several years. German chancellor Angela Merkel said in February 2010: "It's a scandal if it turned out that the same banks that brought us to the brink of the abyss helped to fake the statistics." The ECB is headed by a former Goldman banker, Mario Draghi. The ruling means European taxpayers who are footing the bill for the €240bn Greek bailout will not find out whether EU officials knew of irregularities in Greece's national accounts before they became public in 2009. Georg Erber, a specialist in financial market regulation at the German Institute for Economic Research, told Bloomberg: "The courts are bending the rules to legalise the policies of the European institutions and help stabilise the region. It reveals implicitly that the EU was well informed about what was going on and didn't take steps to avert the crisis."
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Almost 26m people across Europe are now out of work, according to the EU's statistics agency Eurostat, with an 18.7m majority of those living in the eurozone.
The rate has been climbing steadily during the debt crisis. During September the eurozone unemployment rate was 0.1 percentage points lower at 11.6pc, while in the same period in 2011 it was 10.4pc.
The north-south divide in Europe also remains clear, as Austria has an unemployment rate of just 4.3pc, Germany 5.4pc and the Netherlands 5.5pc. Meanwhile, troubled Greece has a rapidly rising rate of 25.4pc and in Spain 26.2pc of people are out of work.
The worst victims of rising unemployment in the eurozone are those under 25. Youth unemployment across the single currency area has now reached 23.9pc, up from 21.1pc in the same month last year. Spain's youth unemployment rate has soared to 56pc. Greece publishes data a month behind much of the rest of the eurozone, but figures from August show that 57pc of young people were out of work.
Graeme Leach, chief economist at the Institute of Directors, said: "This is extremely bad news – it is clear that the instability in the eurozone is not going away, which will impact negatively on the UK.
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"Some will interpret this as a sign to panic and start a tide of spending funded by yet more debt, but that would be precisely the wrong thing to do. With trouble continuing on the continent, it is essential that the Chancellor sticks to his commitment to reduce Britain’s deficit. It’s George Osborne’s role to cut the deficit – it’s the incoming Governor of the Bank of England’s role to stimulate the economy.”
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