John Latsis, who died last week aged 93 at his home in Athens, was the last and wealthiest of the “golden Greek” generation of self-made shipping tycons.
He had been inpoor health for several years after suffering a stroke.
Greek bankers estimate the Latsis family fortune exceeds $10bn. From tankers and oil refining, banking and property development. It also operates a private airline used by senior executives worldwide.
A fisherman’s son, Mr Latsis started as a trader in molasses and dried fruit. His first shipping business was a barge operation for unloading cargo in the port of Piraeus followed immetiately after by a lucrative passenger boat route serving the islands of Saronic gulf.
His break came when Arab business contacts helped finance the purchase of several ageing passenger vessels to carry Muslims from North Africa to Mecca on the annual Haj pilgrimage.
Through his shipping operation, Mr Latsis made the acquaintance of members of the Saudi royal family. He became a contractor and provider of services, building palaces, roads and port facilities, managing the royal family’s yachts and, eventually, taking a 50 per cent stake in the construction and operation of the Rabigh oil refinery.
The Latsis oil trading and tanker business flourished, making extravagant profits during the 1973 oil crisis. Mr Latsis moved his headquarters from Athens to Geneva in the mid-1970s because of political pressure. He became unpopular with Greeks over his support for the rightwing colonels’ regime, which had given him a licence to build the Petrola oil refinery in Elefsis near Athens, but he later kept on good terms with successive Greek prime ministers.
“If we needed cash to plug a deficit somewhere in the public sector, Latsis, was always wiling to write a cheque for $20m,” said one former Socialist official, recalling Greece’s cashflow problems in the 1980s.
Mr Latsis’s son Spiros, who studied at the London School of Economics, launched the group’s move into banking 20 years ago, with the purchase from the Onassis shipping group of Banque des Depots, based in Geneva. EFG, the Latsis banking arm, controls a network of six heavily capitalised private banks as well as EFG Eurobank, Greece’s third-biggest retail bank.
Mr Latsis became a controversial figure in Britain in the early 1990s because of his contributions to the Conservative party, estimated at 2.5m ($3.9m).
During a Nato summit in London, he was famously pictured wearing his trademark electric-blue suit and yachtsman’s cap, with Lady Thatcher, the then UK prime minister, and President George Bush Sr.
Mr Latsis was renowned for his generosity to Greek causes – supporting ex-king Constantine in exile in London and finacing small businesses set up by ethnic Greeks in Albania, whence his family came.
He also made a point of offering one of his biggest yachts, the Alexander, to political and royal friends among them the prince of Wales and Colin Powell the US secretary of state.
Mr Latsis handed over running of the group to Spiros in the early 1990s. He is also survived by his wife, Erietta, and two daughters.
(By Kerin Hope from the Financial Times, 21/04/03)