A Lazard Banker Is the Greeks' Financial Goddess

The schedule of Michele Lamarche, a Lazard banker advising Greece on its debt restructuring, is full of meetings that never happened, officially at least. On a Saturday morning in December, with efforts to cut Greece’s €206 billion ($270 billion) debt in half stalled and a Greek bond payment looming, Lamarche and two colleagues secretly huddled at Lazard’s Paris office with BNP Paribas adviser Jean Lemierre, a negotiator for Greece’s private creditors, according to people involved in the talks. Out of that 30-minute meeting came a novel concept, called co-financing, that would eventually help jump-start the negotiations by putting Greece’s private and public creditors on an equal footing. “This is what advisers do, reach out to creditors and try to unlock stalemates,” says Lamarche. “Sometimes you need to sit down with the other side, talk bluntly and in total confidence.”

Over a 30-year career at Lazard, Lamarche, 63, has negotiated such deals all over the world, always on the side of the debt-strapped sovereign. In Iraq, Argentina, the Ivory Coast, and now in the glare of Greece, Lamarche, short, thin, and elegant in Dior suits and Louboutin high heels, is among a small cast of advisers who show up around the table for almost every major sovereign-debt restructuring. With nations including Portugal and Spain struggling with high debt and sluggish economies, Lamarche’s work is shifting to developed markets in Europe. “Michele Lamarche never got much publicity for her work,” says Luce Gendry, an adviser at Paris-based mergers-and-acquisitions bank Rothschild who has known Lamarche since college. “Restructuring sovereign debt wasn’t something that would make the headlines as much, and it wasn’t her style to care anyway. Now it’s grabbing everyone’s attention.”