Emilios Avgouleas is a Greek professor and researcher specialising in international financial markets and blockchain technology. He holds the chair in international banking law and finance at the University of Edinburgh. He is a member of the stakeholder group of the European Banking Authority as a 'top-ranking' academic. He is also an independent member of the Euro-working group select panel for the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund, which was set up to stabilize the Greek banking sector during the 2010 banking crisis. He is leading industry-linked projects using distributed ledger technology to build markets for trading illiquid financial assets.
Avgouleas practised law as an associate at Clifford Chance and in investment banks. By 2000, he was a partner at Linklaters and then Tsibanoulis & Partners in Athens. In 2007, he switched into academia, taking up the post of professor of international financial markets and financial law at the University of Manchester. In 2012, he moved to the University of Edinburgh, as a professor of international banking. He is an associate director of the Edinburgh Centre for Commercial Law. He is also on the staff of Edinburgh University's blockchain technology lab where he “develops models for the use of blockchain technology to lower transaction costs, enhance investor control over their investments and optimise risk management in financial markets”. He has written about the potential for blockchain technology “to transform the structure and future direction of the financial services industry”. However, at a lecture to the Asian Institute of International Financial Law, Avgouleas also argued that blockchain technology was not yet advanced enough to answer the challenges of securities and derivatives trading and clearing, though a number of platforms showed promise. Avgouleas was called as an expert witness by the House of Lords select committee on the European Union for a 2012 report on MiFID II. Since 2015, he has been a member of the stakeholder group of the European Banking Authority as a ‘top-ranking' academic. Visiting professorships include Yale, Harvard, National University of Singapore, Hong Kong University, Duke Law School, China University of Political Science and Law, and the Athens University of Economics and Business. On the issue of the coronavirus crisis, he has warned that if it lasts more than a few months, “Tens of millions of jobs could be lost despite trillions of dollars being spent on saving businesses and industries”. Furthermore, it could be “the kiss of death for countries and the stability of their financial systems”.
Findings on the Greek banking crisis
Avgouleas was critical of early attempts to stabilize the Greek banking sector during the banking crisis after a bailout by the EU and IMF in 2010. In 2014, he delivered a paper on ethics and restoring confidence at a conference organised by the Hellenic Bank Association, Greece’s national banking trade group. That same year he published a “critical evaluation” of bank bail-in regimes with Charles Goodhart. In 2015, he described the disposal of banking assets as “a fire sale”, resulting in an “enormous loss” for Greek taxpayers. Avgouleas was appointed in January 2016 as an independent member of a selection and evaluation panel for board members of the Hellenic Financial Stability Fund, and contributed to the interim and final financial reports. He returned to the issue of bank bail-ins with Goodhart at the end of the year. In May 2018, he worked on a CEPR report that began: “A spectre continues to haunt Greece and no less its creditors.” It then discussed debt relief, and how schemes could be structured so as to provide the right incentives for budgetary discipline. He also contributed to a CEPR commentary that characterised Greece’s third economic programme as “unlike its two predecessors” in being “relatively successful”. In late 2018, he said a “radical” move by the Greek central bank to buy up non-performing loans held by the country’s banks “has to be welcomed”. In a Financial Times article about addressing Greek bank debt, he pointed to a high level of non-performing loans compared with other EU member states. This came after “a long period of inertia by bank boards and regulatory authorities” as a result of “close relationships between politicians, bankers and favoured businessmen”. At the end of 2019, Avgouleas said that Greece needed infrastructure investment from China after 10 years of financial devastation: "Its stock of capital investment has to be replenished. The only available capital investors are the Chinese." He contributed to an Oxford University blog post that discussed ways of avoiding bank bailouts and a “doom loop” from the public cost of funding such bailouts.
Selected works
Avgouleas, E, and Goodhart, C “Bank Resolution a Decade after the Global Financial Crisis: A Systematic Reappraisal”, in Systemic Risk in the Financial Sector, p. 31-46.
Avgouleas, E and Kiayias, A “The promise of blockchain technology for global securities and derivatives markets: the new financial ecosystem and the ‘holy grail’ of systemic risk containment”, European Business Organization Law Review, 20, p. 81–110. .
Avgouleas, E, and Donald, DC, The Political Economy of Financial Regulation, Cambridge University Press.
