You must watch the press conference with Yanis Varoufakis. In the nicest possible manner considering the circumstances, he describes how he was presented with a memorandum prior to the Eurogroup meeting that he found acceptable and was presented with a different and unacceptable memo, at Eurogroup head Jeroen Dijsselbloem’s instigation, at the top of the session. I don’t see Varoufakis as having insinuated what Mason attributes to him, but it is certainly a logical inference that the Germans were behind this stunt.

Varoufakis clearly considers Djisselbloem messenger boy, and this attack on him is subtextual attack on German duplicity — Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) February 16, 2015

Varoufakis reiterated he’d be happy to sign the older memo or a reasonable variant of it any time. He also does an impressive job of staying upbeat and on message under what have to be trying circumstances.

Update: Not surprisingly, the EU side disagrees with Varoufakis’ account:

There was a draft communiqué shown by Pierre Moscovici but text differences were not that serious: EU Commission source ~@JSLefebvre — Yannis Koutsomitis (@YanniKouts) February 16, 2015

Or not quite:

RT @JSLefebvre: @VaeVix @YanniKouts "entendu dire" means "hear about it". So, the source was not 100% sure about it. — Yannis Koutsomitis (@YanniKouts) February 16, 2015

I suspect we’ll get some sort of rebuttal. But the fact that Varoufakis said repeatedly that he’d sign the older version of the memo would seem to undercut a Eurogroup defense. And now we have this:

No #eurozone official I talked to can figure out why @pierremoscovici draft ok to #Greece but not other one. They say no diff on substance — Peter Spiegel (@SpiegelPeter) February 16, 2015

Ed Harrison’s take via e-mail:

The bias is: “What a minute, this is just optics.” That’s a pro-German bias because that’s what Schaeuble was saying about Greece’s desire not to deal with the Troika: just names. Spiegel is too inside baseball and has been co-opted. He believes Greece is being unreasonable and that it is plausible that the two are the same when it is clear they are not substantively the same – or Greece wouldn’t be apoplectic. That is unless you think Yanis cares about superficial differences.

Update 6:15 PM: It looks like Peter Spiegel’s credibility is mud: