More shocking revelations from Greece

elathimerini.com are running a story in which Varoufakis claims he was given approval by PM Tsipras to plan a possible parallel banking system that would hijack the tax registration numbers of firms and citizens by hacking the General Secretariat of Public Revenues. He also dishes the dirt on his rift with German finance minister Wolfgang Schaeuble

The plan was apparently proposed a month before Tsipras and his Syriza party won the general elections in January.

The new payment system was to run in euros but with the ability to switch to Drachmas overnight if needed and was to be used to bypass the bank closures and controls

To hack the government website Varoufakis says he asked one of his childhood friends, an IT expert who was also a professor at Columbia University. The website was being monitored by the Troika and a week after Varoufakis became finance minister his mate phoned to say he had control of the hardware but not the software that was under the control of the Troika

These details have emerged from a telephone conference call between Varoufakis and international hedge funds and was brokered by former UK Chancellor Norman Lamont on July 16th, a week after he'd left his post as finance minister.

ekathimerini have some of the transcript from that conversation that was recorded with his knowledge;

Varoufakis "We don't have a currency which we can devalue vis a vis the euro, we have the euro"
"[Wolfgang] Schaeuble, the finance minister of Germany, is hell-bent on effecting a Grexit so nothing is over. But let me be very specific and very precise on this. The prime minister before he became PM, before we won the election in January, had given me the green light to come up with a Plan B. And I assembled a very able team, a small team as it had to be because that had to be kept completely under wraps for obvious reasons. And we had been working since the end of December or beginning of January on creating one. "
"But let me give you an example. We were planning along a number fronts. I will just mention one. Take the case of the first few moments when the banks are shut, the ATMs don't function and there has to be some parallel payment system by which to keep the economy going for a little while, to give the population the feel that the state is in control and that there is a plan."

"We were planning to create, surreptitiously, reserve accounts attached to every tax file number, without telling anyone, just to have this system in a function under wraps. And, at the touch of a button, to allow us to give PIN numbers to tax file number holders, to taxpayers.
That would have created a parallel banking system while the banks were shut as a result of the ECBs aggressive action to deny us some breathing space."
"Ok, so problem number one: The general secretary of information systems on the other hand was controlled by me, as minister. I appointed a good friend of mine, a childhood friend of mine who had become professor of IT at Columbia University in the States and so on. I put him in because I trusted him to develop this."
"At some point, a week or so after we moved into the ministry, he calls me up and says to me: "You know what? I control the machines, I control the hardware but I do not control the software. The software belongs to the troika controlled General Secretary of Public Revenues. What do I do?""
"So we had meeting just two of us - nobody else knew - and he said: "Listen, if I ask for permission from them to start implementing this program then the troika will immediately know we are designing a parallel system." But I said: "That won't do, we don't want to reveal our hand at this stage.""
"So I authorised him - and you can't tell anyone that, this is totally between us..."
Normal Lamont interrupts: "There are certainly others listening but they will not tell it to their friends."
Varoufakis (laughing): "I know. I know they are. And even if they do I will deny I said it, so we decided to hack into my ministry's own software program in order to be able break it up to just copy just to copy the code of the tax systems website onto a large computer in his office so that he can work out how to design and implement this parallel payment system.""And we were ready to get the green light from the PM when the banks closed in order to move into the General Secretariat of Public Revenues, which is not controlled by us but is controlled by Brussels, and to plug this laptop in and to energize the system."

On Schaeuble

"Schaeuble has a plan. The way he described it to me is very simple. He believes that the eurozone is not sustainable as it is. He believes there has to be some fiscal transfers, some degree of political union. He believes that for that political union to work without federation, without the legitimacy that a properly elected federal parliament can render, can bestow upon an executive, it will have to be done in a very disciplinary way. And he said explicitly to me that a Grexit is going to equip him with sufficient bargaining, sufficient terrorising power in order to impose upon the French that which Paris has been resisting. And what is that? A degree of transfer of budget making powers from Paris to Brussels."

It's no surprise that Greece was looking into a plan B but this is the sort of stuff Hollywood writers would be proud of. Added to what Varoufakis may have in the form of recorded meetings with the Eurogroup, this could be very embarrassing and damaging to Greece and the whole of Europe

The full ekathimerini story is here