Management Reshuffle Drives National Bank of Greece (NBG)

National Bank of Greece SA (NYSE: NBG) is following the charge of Greek banks by recovering today on top of major gains seen from their recent lows.  National Bank of Greece had a press release showing that its board of directors has also made some shuffling around of officers aimed at reorganizing and reinforcing the senior leadership of the bank.

Anthimos Thomopoulos, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operations Officer to this day, is appointed Chief Financial Officer & Head of Retail Banking.

Leonidas Theoklitos is appointed Chief Operations Officer over Operations, Business Processes, Information Technology, Purchasing, Property Management and Security.  He will supervise Ethniki Hellenic General Insurance Company operations and will remain Chairman of the Board of Directors of Ethniki Insurance.

Ms. Maria-Ioanna Politopoulou is appointed as General Manager of Non-Performing Lending, a new general division being set up by NBG; she will be in charge of retail banking and small enterprises, non-performing loans and collections.

Georgios Paschas, Chief Audit Executive of the Bank to this day, will transfer to serve as General Manager in charge of Business Processes, Information Technology and Purchasing.

Petros Fourtounis, Corporate Finance Manager so far, is appointed Chief Audit Executive of the Bank and the Group and upgraded to Assistant General Manager.

Giannis Balabanis, Business Processes Manager and Head of Security, will remain at his post and be upgraded to Assistant General Manager.

The Bank΄s Executive Committee will be comprised of CEO Apostolos Tamvakakis and General Managers: Anthimos Thomopoulos, Alexandros Tourkolias, Leonidas Theoklitos and Omer Arras.  The Chief Economist & Chief of Strategy Mr. Paul Mylonas will serve as Secretary.

National Bank of Greece is seeing a 5.5% gain in its ADRs this morning to $3.06 on over 500,000 shares seen in only about the first five minutes of trading this morning.  With a 52-week range of $2.11 to $8.37, NBG has now nearly recovered by 50% from its absolute low share price seen as recently as June 29.

JON C. OGG