NICOSIA, March 4 (Xinhua) -- Irish banker John Patrick Hourican, who pulled the Bank of Cyprus (BoC) out of utter chaos almost six years ago, will leave the Cypriot lender later this year, the BoC board announced on Monday.
It said that Hourican will leave in September, after a six-month notice to the bank's board, in which he said he will pursue a commercial opportunity in the United Kingdom, where he will join his family.
Hourican took over as BoC's CEO in the aftermath of its recapitalization by seizing 47.5 percent of depositors' money in a "bail-in" in 2013, on the instructions of the Eurogroup and the European Central Bank.
The board said in its announcement that Hourican "has guided the bank's restructuring, its recapitalization, a restoration of confidence, and has been instrumental in developing appropriate strategies for dealing with the challenge of coping with large non-performing exposures, shrinking the bank to strength."
It added that Hourican has developed a strong senior executive team that will guide the bank in the period ahead.
Hourican took over the helm of the bank in late 2013 in the most dramatic of the institution's over 100 years of history. He clashed with politicians, accusing them of being populists. He said they made the non-performing loan problem of the banking sector worse with legislation that diluted the law on foreclosures.
Non-performing loans jumped overnight to about 28 billion euros (31.7 billion U.S. dollars), or 52 percent of the bank's total loan portfolio, as a result of the massive economic crisis that hit the eastern Mediterranean island in 2013.
Bad loans at BoC itself exceeded 15 billion euros and currently stand at 4.8 billion euros, a 68 percent drop after continuously being reduced over 15 consecutive quarters, Hourican said in his report to the bank's board.
In a separate report, the bank said it posted a loss of 104 million euros after tax for 2018, adding that it was a significant improvement on the previous year's losses of almost 552 million euros.
The report said that on the plus side, the bank's capital position has been strengthened thanks to an agreement on the sale of 2.7 billion euros worth of non-performing loans through a project aimed at continuously bringing down bad loans. (1 euro = 1.13 U.S. dollars)
