Former BoC CEO says bank could have recapitalised

Former Bank of Cyprus (BoC) CEO Andreas Eliades said on Tuesday an extension of the deadline to cover a capital shortfall in 2012 would have allowed the lender to complete its recapitalisation.

Eliades said state assistance was always on the cards if the bank failed to cover the entire shortfall.

“State support was the alternative solution,” he told the Nicosia criminal court.

Eliades along with BoC former board chairmen Theodoros Aristodemou and Andreas Artemi, former CEO Yiannis Kypri, and former deputy CEO Yiannis Pehlivanides, are facing market-manipulation charges in connection with their failure to inform the public from June 14 to June 26, 2012, that the lender’s capital shortfall, announced the previous month at €200million, was in fact more than double that.

BoC, Eliades and Aristodemou also face separate charges of misrepresenting the worth of the lender’s financial holdings to shareholders in the June 19, 2012 AGM. The two former executives are also accused of withholding key information from shareholders regarding the capital shortfall.

On Tuesday, Eliades denied being against seeking state assistance, adding that other actions – sale of insurance companies, issue of convertible bonds – were also in the pipeline to cover the shortfall.

He suggested that the European Banking Authority (EBA) could have quietly agreed to a few months’ extension. Anyway, he said, the EBA did not ask anyone to come up with the shortfall immediately.

Eliades said the board in general felt that the capital shortfall could have been covered without state assistance “and that was our effort.”

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.