Bank of Crete (1980–1999)
defunct bank in Greece
The Bank of Crete (Greek: Τράπεζα Κρήτης) was a commercial bank in Greece that functioned from 1980 to 1999.
History
George Koskotas bought the newly established Bank of Crete in 1984. At its height, the bank operated some 86 branches in all major Greek cities and a representative office in London. Koskotas and his bank were involved in a major corruption scandal in Greece in the late 1980s.
Specifically in November 1988, a shortfall of US$132 million was discovered in the Bank of Crete some months after bank chairman Koskotas, a Greek-American millionaire entrepreneur under investigation for large-scale financial crime, had fled the country. In the months that followed, alleged connections between Koskotas and the PASOK government, and even with prime minister Andreas Papandreou himself, brought the resignations of several ministers and demands for a vote of no confidence in the government. Papandreou was eventually acquitted of criminal charges relating to the scandal in 1992.
The Bank of Crete was sold to Eurobank Ergasias through privatization in 1999.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Bank of Crete (1980–1999)” is defunct bank in Greece. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Bank, Crete and defunct, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 9, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q28855083. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1999, 1984 and 1988.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bank of Crete (1980–1999)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.