ATHENS, Greece — Greece said a complex debt deal with U.S. investment bank Goldman Sachs that has come under scrutiny by the European Union was above board and will be explained in a letter being sent by the finance minister to the European Union.

The EU's top economy official, Olli Rehn, gave the Greek government until today to supply answers on how it used transactions known as currency swaps and how that affected the country's debt and deficit figures.

"There will be a response. There is a letter by the Finance Minister," government spokesman Giorgos Petalotis said, adding it would "most likely" be sent today.

George Papaconstantinou's letter "will analyze the compatibility of those acts with EU regulations and (say) there is no problem, and that other countries have also carried out equivalent actions exactly because Eurostat accepted this until a certain time," Petalotis said, referring to the EU statistics agency.

Athens insists it stopped using the practice when the Eurostat rules changed.

Greece's Socialists sharply revised the budget deficit in October, shortly after winning general elections, to 12.7 percent of gross domestic product from a 3.7 percent forecast months earlier — sending Europe into renewed financial crisis over mounting debts by Greece and several other countries using the euro.

Rehn, speaking in Brussels earlier this week, said a "profound investigation" must be carried out and "if it turns out that there is such kind of securitization of swaps that are not in line with the rules of the time, then of course we would need to take action."

The EU can take Greece to court, under threat of daily fines, to change its statistics methods. It is already threatening legal action for Greece's failure to report accurate public finance figures last year.

French Finance Minister Christine Lagarde, speaking on France Inter radio Thursday, said Eurostat was looking into "how a merchant bank, in this case Goldman Sachs, helped Greece structure, postpone a certain number of debt repayments." Asked whether the bank had broken rules, the minister said: "That is the question that we have to ask ourselves and to which we need the answer. And I don't have that answer today."

Christoforos Sardelis, who headed Greece's Public Debt Management Agency from 1999 to 2004, said earlier this week the deal had not been meant to mask debt.

"There was absolutely no transparency issue," Sardelis said in a telephone interview, adding "we reported these transactions correctly."

Greece has been under severe pressure to bring its finances under control and has imposed a series of austerity measures, including a freezing of civil servants' salaries, cuts in stipends and bonuses, a two-year increase in the average retirement age to 63 and higher taxes.