THE EUROPEAN UNION is still trying to determine the full details surrounding Greece’s debt.

Walter Radermacher, the head of the European Union’s statistics agency Eurostat, told Bloomberg that despite requesting documents from Greece in February, the agency is yet to receive them.

Later this month, Eurostat officials will travel to Greece to assess the size of the country’s hidden debt. Radermacher promised this would mark the start of  “a new era” in Greek financial transparency.

Many of Greece’s transactions were hidden in complex swap contracts – which the country continued to use even after Eurostat directed EU countries to report their use in 2008.

“What the Greeks did was an absolute cardinal sin,” said former Minister for Finance Ruairi Quinn, who presided over a meeting where debt and deficit limits for countries joining the euro were set in 1996.

“They deserve to be punished for it. I think they have been severely punished for it.”

Earlier this year, the EU pumped €110bn into Greece. The country’s debt stood at 115.1% of its total economic output in 2009.