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Bank of Cyprus to list on London Stock Exchange www.theguardian.com
Bank of Cyprus is to list on the London Stock Exchange and expand in the UK, in the latest sign of its path towards rehabilitation since savers were forced to take losses to pump billions of euros into its bailout three years ago.
Under John Hourican, a former senior executive at Royal Bank of Scotland who left during the Libor rigging crisis, Bank of Cyprus has undergone a radical restructuring and repaid all but €800m (£690m) of €11.4bn emergency liquidity assistance used to keep it afloat at the peak of the island’s economic meltdown.
The Mediterranean island was at the heart of the eurozone crisis in 2013 when a rescue deal for Bank of Cyprus – its biggest lender – was a key part of measures need to keep the country inside the single currency area. Laiki, or Cyprus Popular Bank, was closed and its smaller depositors placed in Bank of Cyprus, which in turn imposed losses on savers holding deposits more than €100,000, many of whom were said to be Russian.
It was first bank in the eurozone to take a slice of customers’ savings as part of the international €10bn bailout of the island to avoid recourse to taxpayers.
Hourican, who is Irish, tried to leave last year but was convinced to stay on by veteran banker Josef Ackermann, who became chairman of Bank of Cyprus in 2014 when it received a capital injection from a group international investors led by private equity billionaire Wilbur Ross. Ackermann is a former chief executive of Deutsche Bank, itself mired in financial difficulties.
An attempt at a London listing is a high-profile move for Hourican, who told parliamentarians after the RBS £290m Libor fine that he had told colleagues “they should not waste my death” and clean up the culture of the bank. He was described by Andrew Tyrie MP as a “human shield” for others at RBS.
Hourican has sold off Bank of Cyprus’s Russian arm and scaled back its other international operations but intends to expand in the UK, where there already four branches.
The aim is to target the professional buy-to-let market and small business customers, entrepreneurs and Cypriots living in the UK. The London-based arm is covered by the UK deposit scheme, the Financial Services Compensation Scheme, which covers the first £75,000 of savings.
To facilitate the listing in London – through which Bank of Cyprus does not intend to raise fresh funds – a holding company will be set up in Ireland so that it meets the standards to allow it to be included in the FTSE series of stock market indices. It will remain listed in Cyprus but delist from Athens.
At the time of the bank’s half-year results in August, Hourican described in a Bloomberg interview how the bank and the country had experienced a “significant cardiac arrest” when he took over.
As the bank reported €120m on pre-tax profits for the first nine months of 2016, Hourican said customer deposits had increased 10%. “We remain focused on operating as an accelerator for growth in the real Cypriot economy,” he said.
Published Date:2016-11-16
