Romanian surprise at Canary Wharf

Surprise surprise...the CEO of Canary Wharf is a romanian!

I was going through the top 1000 most influential people in London and guess who I found...a romanian is the third most influential under the Property headline after the Mayor and the Deputy Mayor, because Canary Wharf Group owns the Canary Wharf area.

For those of you not from London, Canary Wharf is an area that was redone into London's financial centre from an old dockland that was bombed in the second world war. Today it boasts the 3 tallest buildings in the UK and hosts: major banks, such as Credit Suisse, HSBC, Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Northern Trust, and Barclays, law firms such as Clifford Chance, as well as major news media and service firms, including Thomson Reuters, and the Daily Mirror.

Born in Romania, Iacobescu trained as an engineer, graduated from the University of Bucharest and then emigrated to Canada and settled in Toronto, where he initially worked for the Olympia and York company as an engineer and later as vice president for development and construction at the World Financial Center in New York, and the Olympia Center and the Neiman Marcus Buildings in Chicago.

Iacobescu joined the Canary Wharf Group in 1988 as Senior Vice President, Construction, to oversee the procurement and construction of the first phase of Canary Wharf. He was promoted to the board of Canary Wharf Holdings Limited as an Executive Director in 1994, was appointed Deputy Chief Executive in 1996 and Chief Executive in March 1997.He was awarded a CBE in June 2003 and became a Trustee of the British Museum in 2007.

Read more here.