Living

The Rich List

Emigrating to the UK in the 1950s and 60s, Cypriots thought the streets there were paved with gold. Although that wasn’t true, some have since created great wealth. But who are the ten wealthiest Greek Cypriots in the UK?

Emigration to Britain from Cyprus reached a peak between the years of 1958 and 1962, during which time a fifth of the current Greek Cypriot population of the UK moved there. Most moved to areas in London, pretty much arriving with only what they had on their backs. Hard work meant that the second and third generation Cypriots had a better life.

And now, the Greek Cypriot community in Britain is considered to be one of the most successful ethnic groups in economic terms. And 85 per cent of those who are on the Greek Rich List (which includes Greeks and Greek Cypriots living in the UK), are self made men (and women).

The list has been compiled by Philip Beresford, who compiles an annual Rich List for the UK, printed by The Times. But who does he list as the richest Greek Cypriots?

1 Alki David & Leventis Family, £1,500m, Industry, 39

Alki David is a member of the prominent Leventis family and his late father, Andrew A. David, was the managing director of the Leventis-David group, a family business that owns bottling plants for Coca-Cola in 28 countries. Alki is reckoned to be the majority shareholder in the business and has set up other companies, additionally featuring in and directing small-scale films including Fishtales, The Good Brother and The Freediver.

The Leventis family has strong links to Cyprus. The Leventis Group was founded by the late Anastasios Leventis, who acquired a Coca-Cola franchise for his trading company in Ghana after WWII. When his Coke bottling plant in Accra was nationalised after independence, Leventis moved his business to Nigeria. The company added the Coca-Cola franchise for Ireland in 1976 and later moved into Greece, the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

The extended Leventis family is undoubtedly very wealthy and supports a huge range of charitable work through the AG Leventis Foundation.

The Guardian, noting that David was bidding to take over Coventry City, the championship football club, in December 2007, put the Leventis family fortune at £4bn. David ultimately pulled out of the Coventry deal, although even the Financial Times referred to him as a ‘Greek billionaire’. The Greek Rich List is slightly more cautious in its assessment of the family fortune and settles for £1.5bn. Buying Coventry City for over £50m (including debt) would have clearly been loose change for David.

2 Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou & Family, Shipping/Entrepreneur, £812m, 41
EasyOffice, a cut-price office rental service, is the latest venture of Sir Stelios Haji-Ioannou, the Greek Cypriot entrepreneur behind the easyJet airline. Stelios, as he is known to one and all, has also found time to launch his own range of watches, the easyWatch range.

Knighted in November 2006 for ‘services to entrepreneurship’, Stelios continues to hustle for new ventures and sees himself as brand manager of the 17 easy brands, which range from easyPizza to easyCruise. He does, however, remain best known as the pioneer of cheap flights through the easyJet operation founded in 1995. Launched with two leased aeroplanes and a £5 million loan from his shipping magnate father, it has gone from strength to strength and is now Europe’s largest cut-price airline. In the year to September 2007, the Luton-based operation delivered a 58 per cent profit rise to £201.9m after flying 37.2 million passengers. But in December 2007 high oil prices and weak traffic numbers took their toll on easyJet as the airline released lower-than-expected traffic numbers.

EasyJet aside, Stelios’ new ventures have consumed large amounts of cash, encountering glitches along the way. Despite this, the brand as a whole has been so successful that the company has had to form a department that deals exclusively with new ideas, many of them put forward by members of the public. ‘Someone suggested a breast implant business called easyBoobs. I get a lot of craziness every day’, says Stelios.

The Haji-Ioannou family stake in easyJet is now worth £673m, having fallen back in the recent stock market turmoil brought on by the credit crunch hitting financial markets. The family shipping company, Stelmar, has recently been sold to a British shipper for £470m, netting the Haji-Ioannou family around £94m. With property and other assets, GRL values the family at £812m.

3 Chris Lazari, Property, £733m, 61
A Greek Cypriot by birth, Lazari went to Britain in the early 1970s to work in the fashion business. In 1978, he diversified into property and has never looked back. Profits at Lazari Investments rose to £26.3m on £54.6m sales in 2006-07, while its net assets rose sharply to £665.7m. But the total value of its portfolio has risen to around £1.25 bn, according to a recent expert valuation by agents, King Sturge. It follows a hectic spending spree by Lazari on West End properties.
In the current climate for property, GRL values the Lazari property interests cautiously and strictly on the net asset figure of £665.7m, adding another £67m to his portfolio for cash and personal property, taking Lazari to £733m.

4 Andreas Panayiotou, Property, £542m, 42
Eschewing the boxing ring on his mother’s advice, Andreas Panayiotou took over the running of his family’s Ability Developments business from his Greek Cypriot-born father in 1996. The business focussed on what were then unfashionable parts of London, with a view to levering up the areas with large and stylish developments. ‘If you go into an area and your developments are big enough, and you are doing enough of them, then you can change the area and upgrade it yourself,’ he says. It worked a treat.

Panayiotou may well have been canny in his timing when he sold £205m worth of his residential portfolio in March 2007, but that was just part of a big sale process by Ability Developments. Adopting a change of direction, in the last year he has been acquiring commercial property to the tune of £300m. He has additionally acquired over seven shopping centres in Germany using a £72m borrowing facility. Ability made a £7.16m loss in 2005-06 when its net assets fell from £190m to £117m, due to changes in accounting practices.

However, taking sale proceeds, investments in Europe and £40m of personal assets, Panayiotou should be worth around £542m when stripping out all bank borrowings.

5 Yianis Christodoulou, Property, £535m, 42
Yianis Christodoulou is the second largest freeholder at London’s Canary Wharf with 2m sq. feet of assets there. He was last in the news in mid-2006 when he bought the Marriott Hotel in Canary Wharf for £110m; not bad for a young man who had to flee Cyprus after the 1974 Turkish invasion to start a new life in Britain.
Leaving school at 16, he trained as a diamond mounter and, at 18, started his own business, taking advantage of a government-sponsored scheme. He saved up to buy his first property, a North London studio flat, and by 1994 he was investing and developing in the property market full-time.

His Yianis Group, with nearly £289m net assets in 2006-07, has various property subsidiaries including Octagon Assets, Octagon Overseas, Canary Riverside Estate Management, Yianis Shipping and Yianis Air. GRL values him at £535m.

6 Andreas Liveras & Family, Food, £315m, 72
Andreas Liveras left Cyprus for Britain in 1963 and started work as a salesman and bakery deliveryman for a patisserie in London. Within five years he had bought the company. The Liveras family, led by his son Dionysios, went back into the quality gateaux market in 1992 with the launch of Laurens Patisseries. From a standing start it grew to make profits of £10m on £62.8m sales in 2004-05, with £75m sales achieved the following year.

In May 2006 the business was taken over by the acquisitive Icelandic group, Bakkavor, in a £130m deal. The Liveras family received a £100m cash windfall and a £30m Bakkavor share stake. The money was put into a family trust. The family has also built a successful yacht charter business called Liveras Yachts. With other assets and property, the family should be worth £315m.

7 Stef Stefanou and Stelio Stefanou, £177m, Construction, 66 & 55
Stef Stefanou implemented what he calls a ‘semi-management buyout’ at the John Doyle construction group in May 2006. No price was disclosed but the construction press suggested that on the back of £3.8m profits and £131.7m turnover in 2005, the business would have been worth around £40m, meaning Stefanou received around £30m for his stake and retained a stake worth nearly £10m.

The group was reorganised in 1999 and split into two. Stefanou took over John Doyle as a construction group. His brother Stelio, who had helped build up the group, took over the maintenance operation re-named Accord. Now a separate company, Accord is primarily a fixer. From filling in potholes to mending leaking roofs, Accord revolves around putting things in order. It now collects household waste from over 10 million homes a year, maintains 20,000 km of road and 83,000 council houses. It was reported in May 2007 that Accord was up for sale with a £150m to £200m price tag. Stelio Stefanou had an 85 per cent stake in Accord, and should have picked up £115m after tax.

In all, GRL values the Stefanou brothers at £177m after tax.

8 Tony Yerolemou & Family, £150m, Food, 65
Tony Yerolemou has been making the financial pages in Cyprus regarding his stake building in a local restaurant operation with franchises such as Pizza Hut. Food is something that Cypriot-born Yerolemou knows a lot about, being the deputy chairman of the Bakkavor food group. In 1960, at just 18, he left Cyprus to complete a business studies course, thereafter remaining in Britain.

In 1983, armed with a £75,000 bank loan, he started Katsouris Fresh Foods, which makes Mediterranean specialities such as moussaka. In 2001, the company was sold for £102m to Bakkavor.

Shrewdly, the Yerolemou family took £32m of their proceeds in Bakkavor shares. With the £50m for cash added, plus property etc, the family is worth around £150m after tax.

9 Theo Paphitis, £135m, Retailing, 48
Very much a public figure thanks to appearing as a judge on the highly popular business talent show, Dragon’s Den, Theo Paphitis was born in Limassol in 1959, and went to Britain aged six with his parents. He went to the local comprehensive in North London, where they failed to detect his dyslexia but allowed him to run the school tuck shop.

His first job upon leaving school aged 16 was helping make the tea at a Lloyd’s insurers. It was a ‘big mistake’ – career opportunities for Greek-Cypriot boys with three O-levels were, as he puts it, limited. At 18, he quit to join Watches of Switzerland as a sales assistant. ‘Shop work paid so much more.’ The new job enabled him to marry Debbie, or ‘Mrs P’.

Two years later he was back in the City, flogging commercial mortgages for Legal & General. Finance ‘meant getting stuck into other people’s business – and I’m a nosy bugger’. Working for others, however, didn’t suit Paphitis and, aged 23, he set up in property finance with a friend. Eventually, bored with property, he started to specialise in turnarounds. He then moved on to create his own firm which turned round stricken brands such as Ryman, the stationer, and the Contessa and La Senza lingerie chains. Until July 2006 he controlled La Senza, but it was sold to Lion Capital, a private equity house, for an undisclosed sum, though the press speculated it could have been up to £100m.

Before this sale, Paphitis had three main but separate companies which together made nearly £13m profit on £191.5m sales in 2004-05. He is keeping a minority stake in La Senza but GRL values his proceeds at around £80m after tax.

Paphitis should be worth around £135m with his property portfolio and past earnings.

10 Nick & Christian Candy, £120m, Property, 35 & 36
In seven years the Candy brothers, Nick and Christian, have turned a £6,000 deposit on a London flat into a multi-million pound empire dealing with the super-rich in London’s luxury property market. Barely a week passes without a new record tumbling to a Candy-inspired move.

In February 2007 they put four flats on the market, each with an £84m price tag. So just who are the Candy brothers, reckoned to be on first name terms with at least 50 of the world’s billionaires? After attending a small private school near the family home in Surrey, the brothers, who have a Greek Cypriot mother and are just eighteen months apart in age, initially went their own way.

Combining for the initial investment in 1998, the Candy brothers saw a niche in the market for creating apartments for people with money to burn, but for whom the tasteless world of gold taps, massive chandeliers and marble everywhere was definitely to be avoided. The combination has created their trademark style – understated, but unmistakably expensive.

So how much are they making from it? Well they live in Monaco as tax exiles. GRL reckons the Candy brothers should be worth conservatively around £120m.

Information and photographs (except where otherwise stated) are taken from the 2008 issue of Greek Rich List magazine. Details at www.greekrichlist.com

OTHERS YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF
George Michael, 95m
Michael took to the road again in 2007, with dates around the world in large stadiums which is thought to have generated around $100m gross. He recently told the South Bank show on British TV that he was “still loaded” even though a couple of his companies showed bad numbers. The Rich List estimates that he has a fortune of £95million.

Andrew Michael, 46m
Still under 30, Michael started the web hosting company Fasthosts in the bedroom of his Gloucester home when he was just 17. Ten years later the company was sold for £61.5 million, of which Michael pocketed about £46 million.

Peter Andre and Katie Price
Australian Greek Cypriot Peter Andre had pretty much given up on showbiz when his appearance on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here reversed his fortunes. On the show he met Katie Price (Jordan) and the two have since married and have two children. Andre has also had some success as a pop singer but really stands in Jordan’s financial shadow. They own a villa in Cyprus said to be worth £1.75 million and are estimated to be worth £30 million between them.

Savvas Christodoulou
The three day annual Erotica fair in London attracts over 80,000 visitors to view its adult lifestyle exhibits. The man behind the show is Christodoulou, former financial controller of Pink Floyd. He is estimated to be worth £10 million.