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The extraordinary figure will enrage cash-strapped Greeks who have lived under crushing austerity measures for seven years. And analysts claim the ECB’s involvement in Greece’s bailout has created a shocking conflict of interest. Leo Hoffman-Axthelm at Transparency International said: “The ECB expects repayments on its Greek bonds with one hand while approving Greece’s reform progress with the other. “The Bank is literally sitting at all sides of the table.”

GETTY Cash-strapped Greeks will be outraged by scale of the ECB profit

GETTY Greek pensioners protests against austerity

The Bank is literally sitting at all sides of the table Leo Hoffman-Axthelm

The cash - interest payments from holdings of Greek sovereign bonds acquired under the ECB’s Securities and Markets bond-buying programme (SMP) - will now be redistributed to across all 19-country central banks in the eurozone. The SMP programme was launched at the start of the eurozone’s debt crisis in 2010 and ramped up to include Italian and Spanish government debt in 2011. It was designed to ease market pressure on the borrowing costs of the eurozone’s member states and preceded the central bank’s more ambitious quantitative easing (QE) programme, which launched in 2015. Greece is barred from QE because it is still under the terms of a third EU bailout which does not end until next August.

GETTY European Central Bank boss Mario Draghi

The ECB has insisted any inclusion into QE will only come when the central bank has deemed Greece’s 180 per cent debt to GDP pile as sustainable. Most of Greece’s near £270bn government debt is in the hands of international rather than private sector creditors. Analysis from the Jubilee Debt Campaign in 2015 estimated the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had made £2.2bn in profits from its loans to the country. The ECB did not give details on the profits accumulated under an agreement with national central banks known as ANFA and said decisions about what to do with the cash would be taken by national member states.

GETTY The ECB has raked in billions of pounds on the back of the Greek debt crisis

Hundreds of retired people protest against planned pension cuts in Greece Tue, October 3, 2017 Approximately 500 retired people attend a demonstration against cutting their retirement salary within austerity measures imposed by the Greek government at Kotzia Square in Athens, Greece Play slideshow REUTERS 1 of 11 Greek pensioners shout slogans during a demonstration against planned pension cuts in Athens