Hüsnü Özyeğin
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Hüsnü Özyeğin (born 1944) is a Turkish businessman in the finance sector and self-made billionaire. He is owner of FIBA Holding, a group of mostly finance companies in Turkey.
Özyeğin was born in 1944. He graduated 1963 from the Robert College in İstanbul and went to the USA with just a thousand dollars in his pocket. There, he studied civil engineering at the Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon, USA, receiving a BS degree. Being more interested in finance, he attended the School of Business at the Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and obtained an MBA.
Following his return back home after three more years in the USA, Özyeğin was offered a post in Pamukbank, which belonged to his schoolmate, Mehmet Emin Karamehmet. In 1977, at the age of only 32, he was appointed general manager of this bank and he held this position until 1984. Then he transferred to Yapı ve Kredi Bankası to become its general manager, a much larger bank in Turkey acquired that year by the same friend.
Özyeğin led Yapı ve Kredi Bankası until 1987, when he decided to establish his own bank, the Finansbank. He expanded it to a bank with more than 200 branches operating in nine countries out of Turkey, mostly in Europe. He later founded several finance companies and brought them under the Holding Fiba, which has around 8,500 employees in 20 companies. In 1996, he entered the retail business purchasing the supermarket chains Gima, Endi, Spar and Greens. Furthermore, Özyeğin signed a franchising contract with the British retail chain Marks & Spencer, and then purchased also the Sakura Bank.
Recently, Özyeğin sold the supermarket chain named GIMA to Sabancı Holding, and acquired in exchange the five-star hotel Swissotel in İstanbul from its Japanese owners. In April 2006, he sold 46% of the shares of Finansbank, which is worth of 2.774 billion USD, to National Bank of Greece, the largest and the oldest commercial bank in Greece. He is expected to remain the bank’s chairman of the board of directors for two more years.
Özyeğin was awarded the "Businessman of the Year" in 2000 by the Turkish magazine "Ekonomist".
