Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has paid tribute to Cretan-born economist and banker Minos Zombanakis, praising him as a man who saw the economy as a means to a better life for the many, and who had the courage to warn of the limits of the very lending system he helped create.
Mitsotakis was speaking at an event honouring Zombanakis at the Chrysostomos Literary Society in Chania, held as part of the “Honouring Chania and its People” series.
“A Cretan who does not joke around”
“I am not here as Prime Minister. I am here as a person who had the good fortune to know him closely,” Mitsotakis said, recalling Zombanakis’s long friendship with his father.
He said Zombanakis had also been an informal adviser to both Konstantinos Karamanlis and Andreas Papandreou, “a source of ideas, prestige and useful international connections”, who never sought titles or office.
Mitsotakis said Zombanakis’s achievements were built on the “raw materials” of Crete: leventia (gallantry), directness and steadfastness. “Even his thick moustache, I believe, was a pointed way of reminding everyone that in front of them was not simply a technocrat, but a Cretan who does not joke around,” he said.
Born in Kalyves, Apokoronas, Zombanakis was admitted to Harvard without even holding a degree, Mitsotakis noted, and went on to earn two master’s degrees and a doctorate.
Libor and the “Frankenstein’s monster”
“He left a mark on the global economy. It was called Libor,” Mitsotakis said, describing it as an ingenious idea that allowed states and businesses to borrow large sums by spreading the risk across several banks, with a floating interest rate based on the estimates of the largest banks.
“It is worth saying, however, that he himself had the courage to diagnose the limits of what he created,” he added. As early as the mid-1970s, Zombanakis sounded the alarm, calling the expansion of lending a “Frankenstein’s monster” and warning that uncontrolled lending to borrowers without a real ability to repay would lead to a dead end.
“If we are to keep one thing from the journey of Minos Zombanakis, I think it is that he understood the economy as a field of action for a better life for the many, and not as a self-referential exercise in the greed of the few,” the Prime Minister said. For Zombanakis, he added, the financial system was “a tool for growth and balance, not a ring of ruthless speculation”.
Mitsotakis said that during the Metapolitefsi, when Greece was struggling to stand on its feet, it was Zombanakis’s personal influence that opened doors to international markets.
He also praised the biography of Zombanakis written by doctor Ilias Gavrilakis, saying it illuminated “not so much the international technocrat, but Zombanakis the man”.
Mitsotakis closed by quoting Zombanakis himself: “My personality is characterised by ambition, moderation and compassion. You cannot be happy if your fellow human beings are suffering.”
A family discovery
The Prime Minister also thanked the society for revealing an aspect of his own family history he had not known, saying he would add to the family archives evidence of the teaching activity of his grandfather, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, whom he had always thought of as a great man who fought in Macedonia.
Also speaking were Dr Gavrilakis and Gikas Hardouvelis, a former minister and chairman of the National Bank of Greece, who recalled first “meeting” Zombanakis in a university textbook and later finding a warm, approachable man behind the banking giant.
The society’s president, Konstantinos Mavrakakis, who opened the event, described Zombanakis’s life as “novelistic” and said “Chania will never forget his universality”.
Source: Proto Thema
