[nomadking]

Originally Posted by Osem

Why they have a case to answer? Well if, as you said yourself, they helped the Greeks cook the books then I'd have thought that's obvious. The only question is to whom they they have a case to answer. Maybe to those countries and institutions who've been bailing out the Greeks and lost billions as a result of a false representation of Greece's economy?...

Suing isn't difficult, doing it successfully is much harder. We all know the Greeks have been acting irresponsibly for decades and must have been complicit in any deception so it'd be ironic (and IMHO highly unlikely) for the Greeks to successfully go down that route. Maybe less so for major German banks.

Goldman Sachs didn't really cook the books as they didn't prepare them. They just used an allowed method, that other countries have used, to keep debt off the books. Just as PFI is businesses borrowing on behalf of the UK Government without it appearing in any debt figures. They did an awful lot of hiding of debt all by themselves.

Greece has provided sovereign backing to Hellenic Railways, thus allowing it to borrow billions even though the company’s finances are so skewed that it pays three times as much on interest expenses than it collects in revenue. As the debt of state-owned enterprises was not counted toward Greece’s official debt, Greece has been able to use the rail system as a means to support employment while not adding to its official debt number; basically an accounting trick to hide debt.

Yet, already, it is too late. Greece is effectively bust — relying on EU cash from richer northern European countries, but this has been the case ever since the country finally joined the euro in 2001.
Two years earlier, the country was barred from entering because it did not meet the financial criteria.
No matter: the Greeks simply cooked the books. Two years later, having falsely claimed to have met standards relating to manufacturing and industrial production and low inflation, the Greeks were allowed in.

Austria did similar things, again all without Goldman Sachs.

Eurostat’s Austria calculations, published last week, now include state-owned companies that were designed to keep them off the government’s books. That move pushed the nation’s debt level up to 82.6 percent of gross domestic product as of the end of June, now exceeding fellow top-rated nations Germany, the Netherlands and Finland, which stay clearly below 80 percent.
The statisticians’ closer scrutiny of nations was triggered by a 2010 audit of Greece’s state accounts, which forced the country to revise its debt upwards by 24.6 billion euros mostly because it had to include state companies it had kept out of official statistics before.