Anthimos
Thomopoulos, chief executive of Piraeus Bank, knew the situation was dire when
he received a call from Brussels. It was the Greek deputy prime minister, about
to board a private jet back to Athens.
The Greek government’s decision, taken in
late June, to hold a public vote on the terms of its financial bailout was
rapidly followed by the imposition of capital controls and a three-week bank
holiday. Panicked customers lined up outside bank branches seeking to withdraw their
€60 daily limit.
This presented an extreme management
challenge for Mr Thomopoulos and his colleagues at Piraeus, one of Greece’s
biggest banks. “Imagine the following: you open up the branches in the morning
and you already have 100,000 pensioners queueing. How do you double the working
hours of staff and deal with the logistics of moving billions around the
system?”
Piraeus had to issue 500,000 new debit cards
in two weeks, mostly to elderly people who did not have one, so that they could
withdraw cash from ATMs while banks were closed. “I told my executive board,
this is the moment of truth,” he says, adding that he drew inspiration from
Bank of America’s early unflappability when it helped San Francisco recover
from the 1906 earthquake.
Four months after those dark days, Greece is
in a more stable condition after it finally agreed an €86bn bailout deal with
eurozone leaders that averted its exit from the euro, as long as it implements
a stringent set of reforms.
But Mr Thomopoulus is still under pressure.
Piraeus needs to raise €4.9bn by the end of the year to fill a capital
shortfall identified a week ago by the European Central Bank. That is 14 times
Piraeus’ own €350m market value and the most any Greek lender has to raise.
Piraeus is considered by some analysts and investment bankers to be in a weaker
position than its three big Greek rivals, mainly because of its higher level of
bad debts. Non-performing exposures make up more than half the loans on its
balance sheet.
If the bank, which is already two-thirds
owned by the state “resolution” fund, fails to raise enough fresh capital from
private sector investors to meet demands from regulators, it could face full
nationalisation. “I am confident that we will make it through,” says Mr Thomopoulos,
still wincing from a shoulder injury suffered while training for open water
swimming. “I’d say generally speaking I’m a lot more positive than at any other
point in this crisis.”
Mr
Thomopoulos boldly predicts that once the dust settles he will be able to claim
credit for saving not only one Greek bank, but two. Before joining Piraeus two
years ago, he was the deputy CEO at National Bank of Greece, where he oversaw
the acquisition of Finansbank in Turkey - a prized asset NBG now plans to sell
to fill a capital shortfall.
“If I manage to raise the money for Piraeus
and NBG gets out of this problem by selling its Turkish business, I will have
helped two banks to get out of resolution,” the 54-year-old says with a grin,
displaying the chutzpah for which he is widely known in financial circles.
This swagger is not always appreciated.
“Anthimos loves to talk about Anthimos,” says one investment banker who met the
Piraeus boss recently. “He thinks very highly of himself and it is difficult to
have a serious conversation with him because he is just posturing the whole
time.”
The Piraeus boss, who studied computer
science at London’s City University in the 1980s before starting his career as
a corporate finance partner at KPMG in Greece, seems to thrive in adversity.
“Physically, yes maybe I’m tired,” he says. “Personally, emotionally, sometimes
I have felt really happy.”
The situation is very different from a year
ago, when big name US investors such as Wilbur Ross and John Paulson rushed to
pour money into the Greek banks, betting on an end to the debt crisis that has
threatened to catapult the country out of the eurozone since 2010.
Those investors are now sitting on painful
losses, including Mr Paulson, who has seen his investment of about €650m in
Piraeus drop by more than 95 per cent. So why would they give the Greek banks
another euro? Mr Ross says he is prepared to put more money into Eurobank, one
of Piraeus’s rivals, but he worries about the Greek government’s “alarming”
interventionist tendencies, adding: “If it is clear that the government will
not ride roughshod over management, then we would be prepared to come in.”
Mr Thomopoulos is confident Greek banks can
raise as much as €5bn-€9bn, insisting that they are a bargain now. The toughest
decision he remembers taking was to buy €25bn of Greek assets from three
crisis-hit Cypriot banks two years ago. With only a weekend to decide, he says:
“We had to take a risk. At the end of the day we went into this transaction
with not much more than a gut feeling.” Some analysts blame the deal for
increasing bad debts, but Mr Thomopoulos says it was a success.
The Piraeus boss says the economy, which
Athens expects to shrink 1.4 per cent this year and 1.3 per cent next year, has
come out of the crisis in better shape than many people feared. Piraeus itself
said bad debts rose only 0.5 per cent in the three months to September.
The impact of capital controls has been
diluted by the €50bn of cash floating around the Greek economy, which kept
consumer spending stable, Mr Thomopoulos says. In addition, businesses had
months to prepare by hoarding cash and moving some offshore.
After the re-election of Alexis Tsipras as
prime minister at the head of the leftwing Syriza party in September, the
Piraeus boss is even optimistic about the political climate, reckoning reality
has dawned on the country’s leaders. “All the illusions, all the myths, all the
rhetoric that there might be a magical way other than hard work and reform to
pull the country out of its current condition, all these have been crushed,” he
says.
Mr Thomopoulos swells with pride when
describing what his bank and country have gone through. “The outside world has
not been allowed to fully fathom the fighting spirit of Greece,” he says,
adding: “There was no breakdown in society.” Greece’s borrower-friendly laws
have allowed people to stop servicing their loans by simply filing a claim to a
magistrate and securing a court date more than a decade in the future. He says
this law is being reformed after “some grotesque scenarios”. But only 150,000
Greek households took this debt holiday, which he says “speaks volumes for the
moral standing of Greek people”.
More than a century ago, Mr Thomopoulos’s
grandfather left his rural Greek village at the age of 18 to set up a business
in the US with three brothers. They returned to fight one of Greece’s frequent
wars against the Ottoman Empire and two of his brothers died early in the
conflict. “Why was this man fighting? Because he felt they did not belong in
the Ottoman Empire and Greece should have a different future,” he says.
He considers the drive to keep Greek banks
afloat and stay in the eurozone to be an extension of the same struggle. “In a
country like Greece, severing the relationship with Europe is not just economic
and financial, it is about democracy and it is about institutional stability.
That would have taken the country literally back to the woods. It would be a
monumental failure to blow up 100 years of hard work and sacrifice.”
Πηγή:
ft.com
Δεν υπάρχουν σχόλια:
Δημοσίευση σχολίου