John Hourican, the Irish banker hired in late 2013 to help stabilize a lender at the epicenter of Cyprus’s financial crisis, had barely waded through initial briefing papers on arriving in Nicosia when he got a phone call.
Georgios Vassiliou, the country’s former president and chief negotiator for its accession to the European Union almost a decade earlier, was on the other end of the line.
“He said: ‘Peter Sutherland has been on the phone to me and he’s told me to look after you,’” Hourican recalls.
He needed all the allies he could muster and there was no better one than Irish man Sutherland, a former European commissioner and ex-head of a predecessor to the World Trade Organisation, among other notable roles.
Hourican arrived on the scene as Cyprus was in the middle of an international bailout, fuelled by an implosion of the island’s banks. He took charge of Bank of Cyprus, the country’s largest company, which had just been through a massive restructuring, including the inflicting of losses on depositors and the forced takeover of much of the assets of smaller rival Cyprus Popular Bank.
“It was very touch-and-go at times as to whether I could succeed – or, indeed, whether I wanted to be there,” Hourican says, especially as his wife, Rioghnach, and four children remained in Dublin.
After shrinking the group’s balance sheet by almost one-third, cutting bad loans by more than two-thirds, strengthening its capital base, and attracting €5 billion of fresh deposits, Hourican is preparing to step down in the coming months to join UK consumer finance group NewDay.
Vassiliou, now 88, turned up at Hourican’s last annual general meeting as chief executive of Bank of Cyprus two weeks ago and took to the floor to “wholeheartedly” thank both the Irish man and outgoing chairman Josef Ackermann, the Swiss former head of Deutsche Bank, for rebuilding the bank and supporting the country’s recovery.
