But the Russians, though badly bruised, are now in a position to get something that has previously eluded even Moscow’s most audacious oligarchs: control of a so-called systemic financial institution in the European Union.
“They wanted to throw out the Russians but in the end, they delivered our main bank to the Russians,” said the Cypriot president, Nicos Anastasiades, in a June interview.
The March bailout hammered bank creditors and depositors in an early test of what has since become the official European Union policy of “bailing-in” banks. The policy is intended to force creditors and depositors to pay for a bank’s mistakes and to spare taxpayers from picking up the entire bill.
The strategy, however, has generated unintended consequences in the case of Cyprus. The exercise was meant to banish what Germany and other Northern European nations viewed as dirty Russian money from Cyprus’s bloated banks. Instead, it has pulled Russia even deeper into Europe’s financial system by giving its plutocrats majority ownership, at least on paper, of the Bank of Cyprus, the country’s oldest, biggest and most important financial institution.
“Whoever controls the Bank of Cyprus controls the island,” said Andreas Marangos, a Limassol lawyer whose clients include many Russians.
The biggest single chunk of shares — around 18 percent — is supposed to go to depositors who lost money in Cyprus’s now-defunct Laiki Bank, but this stake is likely to be controlled by Cyprus’s central bank. As a result of a forced conversion of Bank of Cyprus deposits into shares, however, a diverse and so far unorganized group of depositors, most of them Russians, will end up with a controlling stake.
Whether they want such a bank is another matter. Owning the Bank of Cyprus, which has been saddled with $11.7 billion in liabilities racked up by Laiki Bank, “is like owning cancer,” said Irakli Bukhashvili, the head of a financial services company serving Russians here in Limassol, the business capital of Cyprus.
Despite its wobbly condition, the Bank of Cyprus still holds a uniquely influential position in the economic and political affairs of a sun-swept nation that sits on potentially large reserves of natural gas and straddles strategic fault lines between East and West.
President Anastasiades, in a June letter to the European Central Bank that pleaded for help to keep the Bank of Cyprus afloat, described it as a “mega-systemic bank” that, if it failed, could bring down the entire Cypriot economy. With 5,700 employees and around half of all the island’s deposits, it dwarfs its rivals and reaches into every corner of the country through a vast network of branches, which now also includes the former offices of Laiki Bank.
Moscow, though furious over the billions lost by Russians in Cypriot banks, still sees Cyprus as a prize worth courting. The Russian government has pushed for access for its military aircraft to an air base in Paphos and for its warships to Cypriot ports.
When Cyprus first appealed for help from the so-called troika of international creditors — the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank — the main problem was Laiki, the country’s second-biggest bank and one that was already effectively insolvent. Instead of just throwing Cyprus a financial lifeline, as it had done with Ireland after a banking crisis that led the government to guarantee all the banks, the troika demanded that Laiki and the Bank of Cyprus share the burden of any rescue deal.
Depositors with large accounts in Laiki Bank were initially left with just 100,000 euros each, about $130,000, and the rest of their money was confiscated as the bank shut down. Those with more than 100,000 euros in the Bank of Cyprus lost access to 90 percent of their cash, although they have since been promised future access to some of their frozen funds. But, under final terms announced on July 30 by the Central Bank of Cyprus, large depositors in the Bank of Cyprus will have 47.5 percent of their money forcibly converted into shares, up from 37.5 percent in an original plan.
Dimitris Bounias contributed reporting from Nicosia, and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/22/world/europe/russians-still-ride-high-in-cyprus-after-bailout.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
