BoC AGM

The Bank of Cyprus (BoC) annual general meeting takes place on Tuesday afternoon in Nicosia, with the BoC shareholders set to elect a new board of directors.

Two candidates have stepped down while the Central Bank of Cyprus (CBC) has not yet approved the nominees.

The election of members to the Board of Directors is subject to approval by the CBC, which said today that it has been unable to carry out checks on the candidates to establish whether they met the criteria.

It would have been “desirable for the evaluation of all candidates to take place beforehand to avoid the possibility of some being deemed unsuitable after their election” a CBC spokeswoman said. But she added that “because of the fact that even at this moment, not all candidacies have been submitted to the CBC is had not been possible to evaluate them.”

Meanwhile, two candidates out of a total of 49 have withdrawn. They were Spyros Episkopou and Constantinos Herodotou, both nominated by a former senior executive and director of the BoC Evdokimos Xenophontos. Herodotou cited personal reasons for withdrawing his candidacy, whereas Episkopou said that he did not qualify as an independent after an amendment of the relevant legislation approved by parliament last week..

The BoC exited administration status in late July, after it was recapitalised by bailing-in its depositors. Its new shareholder base comprises of about 121,000 shareholders arising from the conversion of deposits to equity (they hold 81.4 per cent of the shares); 88,000 shareholders arising from the conversion of shares and debt securities issued as of March 29, 2013 (‘old’ shareholders of the bank who now hold 0.5 per cent of total shares); and 18.1 per cent is held by ‘legacy’ Laiki creditors.

Laiki creditors are the only stakeholders owning more than 5 per cent of the bank’s stock.

The law was recently modified, broadening the resolution authority to consist of a trio comprising the Central Bank, the finance ministry and the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Last Friday the new resolution authority decided in its majority to give the permanent secretary of the finance ministry a proxy to represent the 18 per cent of legacy Laiki creditors.
Russian and Ukrainian depositors represented by various Cypriot law firms collectively hold about 12 per cent.

The BoC announced Monday that lawyer Christodoulos Vassiliades has been granted proxies by shareholders which, in combination with his own rights, entitle him to exercise voting rights corresponding to 8.32 per cent of the BoC’s total share capital.

Vassiliades has nominated two candidates for the BoC board, Erishkan Kurazov and Anton Smetanin.

The bank’s annual general meeting will take place at Nicosia’s ‘Filoxenia’ conference centre at 4pm. Three halls with a capacity for 1,000 people have been allocated for the event.

Visit http://www.bankofcyprus.com/Start/Investors-Relations/Announcements/ for the full list of candidates and latest BoC announcements.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.