After playing down reports over the weekend that said he was planning to resurrect the Drachma as a parallel currency to get Greece through its financial crisis with Europe, former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis now acknowledges that there was a “Plan B” – and says there was absolutely nothing nefarious about it.

Yanis suspects some of Greece’s right-leaning newspapers are trying to set the stage for treason charges against him. 

“The context of all this is that they want to present me as a rogue finance minister, and have me indicted for treason.  It is all part of an attempt to annul the first five months of this government and put it in the dustbin of history,” Yanis told the London Telegraph.  “It totally distorts my purpose for wanting parallel liquidity.  I have always been completely against dismantling the euro because we never know what dark forces that might unleash in Europe,” he added.

Former Sydneysider Varoufakis admits a small team under his direction had come up with a parallel payment system.  The secret scheme would have eased the way to the return of the nation’s former currency, the Drachma.  He insists that it “would have been remiss” had his ministry not planned ahead – especially since the grumpier European creditors were already drawing up similar plans of their own to impose on Greece.  Several noted economists, including Nobel laureate Paul Krugman and James K. Galbraith, advocated such ideas.

Over the weekend, Varoufakis suggested that his “defamers” had overactive imaginations.  But on Monday, the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum leaked the audio from a 16 July conference call – after he stepped down from the Finance Ministry – in which he detailed the plot, and said he would deny it if it ever came back to him.

“We decided to hack into my ministry’s own software program in order to be able to copy the code of the tax system’s website onto a large computer in his office so that he can work out how to design and implement this parallel payment system,” Varoufakis was heard telling the moderator during the call.

This fresh turmoil comes as Yanis’ former boss Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras is facing opposition from within his own Syriza Party for accepting the awful, terrible, horrible deal that keeps Greece firmly in the Euro in exchange for imposing more austerity – rendering Yanis’ “Plan B” a matter for academics and lawyers to argue.