Greek debt crisis: Meet the Goldman Sachs banker who got rich getting Greece into the euro

Antigone Loudiadis has been richly rewarded for her dealmaking prowess and now sits atop one of Europe’s fastest growing insurance companies

Antigone (Addy) Loudiadis

If you thought the Goldman Sachs banker who did the deal to get Greece into the euro might have been chased out of the City of London, think again.

Antigone Loudiadis, more widely known as “Addy”, has been richly rewarded by the bank for her dealmaking prowess and now sits atop one of Europe’s fastest growing insurance companies, Rothesay Life.

The 52-year-old, who lives with her family in a vast stucco house in west London, was one of the brightest stars in Goldman’s Fleet Street headquarters.

While she lists her nationality as Greek, her education was as English as can be. Schooled at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, she went on to Oxford University before joining JPMorgan, and then Goldman, gaining partner status in 2000.

Goldman Sachs Manhattan headquarters (Getty)

Colleagues describe her as “fiercely clever”, although by some accounts, she was simply fierce. It is said some of her staff would pretend to be on the phone when she walked past them in the office to avoid her infamous rollockings.

Although her Continental twang remains hard to place, her fluency in Greek and strong connections in the country were instrumental in winning the lucrative mandate to create the financial deals that would flatter the country’s debts.

Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras is applauded by lawmakers before addressing his parliamentary group meeting at the Greek Parliament in Athens (AFP)

Christoforos Sardelis, former boss of Greece’s Debt Management Agency who worked on the trades with her, told Bloomberg she was “very professional – a little bit aggressive as is everyone at Goldman Sachs”.

But she was trusted by the government which, it should be remembered, was far more right wing than the Syriza party.

What it most liked about her seems to be the way she could magic away the country’s dismal financial position. The trade she came up with is reported to have made the bank hundreds of millions of dollars, although only Goldman knows the true figure.

Reports suggest she was paid up to $12m a year by the time she was named co-head of the investment banking group. Not that it wasn’t a stressful job. In an interview in 2005 she told the Wall Street Journal she was “your typical Type A workaholic smoker” with a “stressful schedule”.

Goldman moved her to head Rothesay Life which it set up in 2007 to buy big companies’ pension funds. She is likely to get a multimillion-pound payday when, as the City expects, Rothesay floats next year with a potential value of £3bn.