E. Gerald Corrigan, PhD., managing director, Goldman Sachs

A senior Goldman Sachs banker said in London on Monday that Greek debt hiding schemes the US investment bank had facilitated, "could have and should have” been more transparent. The European Commission is investigating currency swap transactions which enabled Greece massage national debt figures in 2001, just after being admitted to the European Monetary Union.

Gerald Corrigan, a Goldman managing director told a UK parliamentary committee that it had helped to cut Greece's official debt ratios by modest amounts.

The Euro Stability and Growth Pact has a ceiling on annual budget deficits of 3 per cent of GDP (gross domestic product) and a total national debt limit of no more than 60 per cent.

"Governments go to some lengths to try to manage their budgetary deficit and public debt positions," Corrigan told the Treasury Select Committee. "There is nothing new about this, unfortunately, the practices have been around for decades, if not centuries."

In a statement, Goldman said: “In December 2000 and in June 2001, Greece entered into new cross-currency swaps and restructured its cross-currency swap portfolio with Goldman Sachs at a historical implied foreign exchange rate.”

Goldman added:“These transactions reduced Greece’s foreign-denominated debt in euro terms by €2.367bn and, in turn, decreased Greece’s debt as a percentage of [gross domestic product] by just 1.6 per cent, from 105.3 per cent to 103.7 per cent.”

The budget deficit was 4.5 per cent of GDP in 2001 because of the swaps, instead of 4.6 per cent.

Corrigan said Goldman officials discussed the swaps with Eurostat, the EU statistics agency, at the time they were made, but the agency tightened the rules in subsequent years. That fact "suggests they were more liberal than they should have been in 2001," he said. "Goldman was by no means the only bank involved with these types of instruments. These transactions were consistent with standards of behaviour and measurements used by the European community.... It is clear with hindsight that the standards of transparency could have been and probably should have been higher."

"These (debt swaps) were (viewed as) "legal", they were securitizations…The securitization issue was okayed amongst the Europeans. It may appear exposed to something strange, and perhaps it was," Gikas Hardouvelis, former director of economic office for the Greek Prime Minister during 2000-2004 administration, said on Thursday, Feb 18. "It was not something that was done in Greece alone...They tried it in Spain, they tried it in Italy."

Bloomberg reported last week that that Goldman managed $15 billion of bond sales for Greece after arranging a currency swap that allowed the government to hide the extent of its deficit.

No mention was made of the swap in sales documents for the securities in at least six of the 10 sales the bank arranged for Greece since the transaction, according to a review of the prospectuses by Bloomberg.

Corrigan, who until 1994, was president of the New York Federal Reserve, also told the Committee that it was a "wrenching human experience" to disagree with the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volcker, now an adviser to President Barack Obama, who has proposed new rules to curb proprietary trading and hedge fund activities by major banks.