Senior European officials lashed out at Moody’s on Wednesday, questioning the timing of the debt rating agency’s downgrade of Portuguese bonds this week and threatening regulatory action against all three major rating agencies.
The criticism follows long- simmering European complaints about Moody’s and its two competitors, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, centring on whether they have improperly attempted to influence policy-making in the ongoing debt crisis.
The Portuguese downgrade of four notches to “junk” status, comes amid a heated debate over how hard to push private owners of Greek debt to allow Athens to delay repayments. It also rekindled fears of the debt crisis spreading to bigger European economies.