February 2002
If in doubt, blame the unions
GREECE
It's pretty routine in Greece, where organized labour has a
privileged status, to blame the unions for industrial hiccups. But
in the case of the embarrassing breakdown of the merger between the
country's largest state-owned bank, National Bank of Greece (NBG),
and its biggest private-sector counterpart, Alpha Bank, the unions
were, in the words of one local banker, "an excuse, not a cause".
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Costopoulos (r) and National Bank's
Karatzas: not seeing eye to eye |
The sticking point in the negotiations reportedly had very
little to do with fears of job losses. Instead, says one analyst,
the deal was torpedoed by internal politics at Alpha Bank. Senior
managers there were dismayed to find that this was not the merger
of equals they had expected. Fearful that their influence - and
even their jobs - would be casualties of the merger, those outside
the inner circle of Alpha's chairman, Yannis Costopoulos, became
increasingly strident in their demands for parity within the new
bank's executive committee.
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