A Lie Detector Cleans Up a Kazakhstan Bank

摘要

When Michael Eggleton arrived in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in 2009 to take over as chief executive officer of Eurasian Bank, he knew something drastic had to be done to repair the lender's image. The bank, Kazakhstan's 10th largest, was losing money, and Eggleton's predecessor had been arrested on suspicion of embezzlement in connection with $1.1 billion in losses at Almaty-based Alliance Bank, which he led from 2002 to 2007. (He was later convicted.) Three other Kazakhstan lenders had just defaulted on a total of about $20 billion in debt. So Eggleton flew a polygraph machine into the Central Asian country. "We had just come through one of the biggest economic crises in the world, and I had just arrived in a new country," says Eggleton 44, a former Merrill Lynch and Credit Suisse banker who was born in the U.S. "There was no confidence in the banks. I was trying to address concerns of the market."