PRESS RELEASE

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Eurogroup President Dijsselbloem Puts Bail-In on Priority Agenda

June 11, 2014 (EIRNS)—Jeroen Dijsselbloem, the president of the Eurogroup, comprising mainly the finance ministers of the Eurozone countries, was in Vienna yesterday, for talks on the banking situation there, and at a press conference, he told journalists that "bail-ins make a lot of sense, from both a budgetary as well as an economic point of view," not only in Austria, which is just implementing a EU900 million bail-in for the ailing Hypo Alpe Adria bank, but everywhere else in Europe.

He issued a statement the same day, announcing that Euro area Member States had just "reached a political understanding on the operational framework" for the European Stability Mechanism mandating bail-in as part of any bank rescue operations.

Dijsselbloem had been the first EU official, in the spring of 2013, to state that the Cyprus bail-in was a blueprint for the rest of Europe.

As Dijsselbloem was in Vienna hyping bail-in, Standard & Poor‚Äôs announced that it had downgraded ratings for Hypo Alpe Adria and six other Austrian banks (Erste Group, Raiffeisen Zentralbank, Raiffeisen Bank International, KA Finanz, Hypo NiederËÜsterreich, UniCredit Bank Austria), precisely because Austria is readying imposition of a 900-million-euro bail-in for Hyo Alpe Adria bank.