Dear ECB, see Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act III, Scene II…

Landon Thomas and Jack Ewing of Dealbook have happened across a delicious leak of ECB council minutes, running from May 2012 to January 2013.

Here’s the ECB’s response:

The E.C.B. neither provides nor approves emergency liquidity assistance. It is the national central bank, in this case the Central Bank of Cyprus, that provides E.L.A. to an institution that it judges to be solvent at its own risks and under its own terms and conditions.

In this specific case, there was full consensus in the governing council on the need to get assurances from the Central Bank of Cyprus that this bank was solvent. The solvency was confirmed explicitly by the Central Bank of Cyprus, which also confirmed the proper valuation of collateral after an intense dialogue between it and the E.C.B.

The E.C.B. was not the supervisor and fully relied on the assessment of the Central Bank of Cyprus. Therefore to draw conclusions about the E.C.B.’s future banking supervision role on the basis of E.L.A. to Cyprus is tendentious.