Biography
Latsis was born in Katakolo — a fishing village in the Elis — (although his origins are in Epirus), the seventh of 21 children, the son of Spiro Latsis and Aphrodite Efthimiou. He was educated at the Pyrgos School of Commerce and the School for Merchant Navy Captains.
He started as a deckhand, eventually working his way up to ship's captain in the merchant marine. He bought his first cargo vessel in 1938 and by the 1960s, owned a fleet of ships. In the late 1960s, he diversified his business to include oil — establishing Petrola — and construction, building (among other things) oil refineries in Greece and Saudi Arabia, before gradually expanding into banking and financial services. His European Financial Group owns banks in the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Monaco, the Channel Islands and Greece.
In 1990, he hosted the G7 Economic Conference at Bridgewater House, Westminster, London. He was a close friend of Charles, Prince of Wales, twice loaning him the use of his yacht Alexandros, firstly in 1991 for a second honeymoon with the Princess of Wales, and secondly in 2002 for a cruise with Camilla Parker-Bowles. Others to whom he lent the ship included former President George H. W. Bush, Colin Powell, and Marlon Brando. He also maintained close ties with the Saudi royal family.
The year of his death, Forbes magazine ranked him 101st on its list of the world's richest people, with a fortune estimated at US $5.4 billion.
Read more about this topic: Yiannis Latsis
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)