Hellenic Financial Stability Fund

Piraeus Bank, Greece's largest bank by assets, aims to sell its Balkan businesses and certain other holdings and shrink its bad loans portfolio, its new chief executive told reporters on Wednesday, outlining the group's plans up to 2020.

"Our vision is to be the most credible bank in Greece," said CEO Christos Megalou, who took over in April.

Greece picked Austrian banker Martin Czurda as the new chief executive of its bank bailout fund HFSF, an official at the Fund told Reuters on Thursday.

"The appointment was published in the Government Gazette today," the official said.

The Hellenic Financial Stability Fund had been looking to fill the post for months.

Piraeus Bank, Greece's largest lender by assets, tumbled to a fourth-quarter loss after booking higher bad debt provisions, the only one of the country's big four banks that was not profitable in the last three months of 2016.

Former Eurobank chief executive officer Christos Megalou is the new head of Piraeus Bank, completing the administrative changes in the group after more than a year.

The HFSF bank bailout fund may be forced to roll down its shutters on Thursday due to the administrative crisis that has been dogging it since last summer.

Greece has picked two former business leaders to run the fund it set up last year to speed up privatizations and make the best use of the country's assets to comply with its international bailout.

The process for the appointment of a new chief executive officer will resume in 2017, Piraeus Bank's governing board decided on Monday.

Earlier, the majority of the board had voted down the lone candidacy of Christos Papadopoulos due to reservations expressed by the European Central Bank's Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM).

National Bank of Greece announced on Thursday it has proceeded to the repayment of contingent convertible bonds (CoCos) amounting to 2.03 billion euros which it issued in December 2015 and were held by the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund (HFSF).

[Reuters]

Wednesday's Piraeus Bank board meeting, during which a new chief executive officer was supposed to be elected for the lender, was unexpectedly suspended as an email from the European Central Bank's Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) arrived asking for the process to be stopped so that the two short-listed candidates could be examined further.

The Hellenic Financial Stability Fund has rejected former Piraeus Bank chief executive Anthimos Thomopoulos's candidacy for his old post, opting instead to propose Christos Papadopoulos and Stelios Papadopoulos (who are not related) for the position at the lender of which the bank bailout fund controls 26 percent.