To Greece with love: Troika sent €10 billion to Athens per cargo planes to avoid euro collapse

Aha! Every time the Troika delayed a bailout installment, planes full of money allegedly arrived to debt-ridden Greece to feed the banks and satisfy demand for cash. It wasn’t the Greek politicians’ slogan “We can manage with a bailout delay” – as the repeatedly said – but it was the Troika itself personally that sent  the money cargo planes to Athens to avoid the collapse of the Greek banks and cause unrepairable damage to the common currency, the Euro. A total of 10 billion euro!

According to UK Daily Mail, the money flights rushed to Greece twice: once in 2011 and once in 2012.

Below some excerpts from the exclusive story of Faisal Islam:

The secret plane stuffed full of cash that saved the euro: When Greece burned and its banks melted, the EU talked tough and threatened to cut it loose… but covertly flooded it with €10billion

• The European bank Troika boosted Greek banks through secret flights
• Billions of euros were flown to Greece and Cyprus to save the currency
• Because the flights to Athens and Larnaca that began in 2011 were nothing short of a secret airlift.

  The mission was neither to save lives nor even to preserve a fragile democratic freedom like the famous airlifts in post-war Berlin, but to protect and prolong the  economic experiment of a multi-national currency. Billions in freshly minted euro notes made a clandestine journey to struggling Greece – a drama worthy of a John Le Carré novel but authored in Frankfurt am Main, known as Mainhattan, world headquarters of the euro.

• Soon there would be not enough euro notes in the country to cope with the number of Greeks trying to get their hands on their money from cash machines and banks. And so a secret plan was activated.  ‘We’re talking about June 2011,’ a senior official overseeing Greece’s bailout told me. ‘Greeks were taking about one to two billion euros a day from the banking system. The Greeks had to send military planes to Italy to get banknotes. It got to that point.’
• By June 2012, Greek demand for paper currency had nearly trebled and amid last summer’s electoral tumult, the secret missions started in 2011 were once again required.

  The response was extraordinary. While issuing public threats to Greeks, in private the Troika authorised military and commercial cargo planes to feed them euros – billions-worth on every flight. They were intended not only to preserve Greece’s fracturing social stability, but also to preserve the single currency itself.(Full story here)
  

PS Everybody here can reckon Greek press reports that there was no money to pay pensions etc and politicians immediately dismissing such claims.

I remember to have reported earlier this year about similar money flights claims, but I’m just too lazy to search for the link. It’s Sunday 🙂