European Central Bank on Thursday offered full coverage to Bank of Greece’s actions in the settlement of bond trading.

In a letter, ECB’s executive commission member, Gertrude Tumpel Guegerell, said Bank of Greece’s decision to adopt the recycling procedure in the settlement of bond trading, was justified in order to prepare its operations for T2S, Europe’s future settlement system.

It also stressed that no logical connection between short selling and recyckling has been established so far and noted that short selling was an aggressive trading strategy, which was generally not affected by settlement procedures. Therefore, ECB said, it was unlikely that a measure adopted to facilitate settlement to have any affect on recent developments in the domestic bond market.

The ECB executive said recent initiatives taken by some European countries to contain short selling did not envisage changes in the time period of recycling and focused only on transparency demands over the settlement of securities trading.