Stavros Niarchos

Stavros Niarchos   (businessman, shipowner)
Born	Stavros Spyros Niarchos 3 July 1909 Athens, Greece
Died	15 April 1996 (Age 86) Zürich, Switzerland
Nationality	Greek
Alma mater	University of Athens
Children	• Maria Niarchos • Philip Niarchos • Spyros Niarchos • Konstantin Niarchos • Elena Ford
Spouse	Helen Sporides
Member of	The 1001 Club
Greek shipping magnate. Worked closely with the CIA. Bilderberger.

Stavros Spyrou Niarchos was a Greek billionaire shipping tycoon. Starting in 1952, he had the world's biggest supertankers built for his fleet. Propelled by both the Suez Crisis and increasing demand for oil, he and rival Aristotle Onassis became giants in global petroleum shipping. He attended the 1967 and 1968 Bilderberg meetings, and was a member of the The 1001 Club

Alfred Ulmer worked as CIA station chief in Athens from 1953 to 1955, where he made the acquaintance of Niarchos. Niarchos worked closely with the CIA and was able to obtain various economic benefits after the junta seized power in Greece. This role got him into trouble after the end of the dictatorship and he agreed to sell his stake in a refinery, valued at $121 million, to the Greek state for $12.4 million. The state had previously filed claims of $63 million.

Early life

Stavros was born in Athens to a wealthy family, son of Spyros Niarchos and his wife, Eugenie Koumantaros, a rich heiress. His great-great-grandfather, Philippos Niarchos, a Greek shipping agent in Valletta, had married a Maltese woman, a daughter from a noble family in Malta, whose younger offspring had migrated to Greece to base themselves in a merchant business from Malta.

His parents were naturalized Americans who had owned a department store in Buffalo, New York, before returning to Greece, three months prior to his birth. They returned to Buffalo for a brief time and the young Stavros attended the Nardin Academy grammar school. They returned permanently to Greece and Stavros studied in the city's best private school before starting university. He studied law at the University of Athens, after which he went to work for his maternal uncles in the Koumantaros family's grain business. During this period, he became involved in shipping by convincing his uncles their firm would be more profitable if it owned its own ships.

Second World War

During the Second World War from 1941 to 1945, Niarchos was an officer in the Hellenic Navy on a destroyer. At about the same time he was honorary naval attaché at the Greek Embassy in Washington. This is also where his plan for the time after the war came into being.

Starting in 1945, Niarchos bought up decommissioned merchant ships and tankers from the US Navy. As compensation for the war-related loss of his pre-war fleet, he was granted low prices; he allowed the ships to sail the seven seas under the flag of convenience. However, US ports were not allowed to be approached for legal reasons.

Shipping career

Niarchos was a naval officer in World War II, during which time part of the trade fleet he had developed with his uncle was destroyed. He used about two million dollars in insurance settlement to build a new fleet. His most famous asset was the yacht Atlantis, currently known as Issham al Baher after having been gifted to King Fahd of Saudi Arabia.

He then founded Niarchos Ltd., an international shipping company that at one time operated more than 80 tankers worldwide. After the first business successes, which were mainly triggered by the Korean War and the Suez Crisis, he had the first supertankers built and acquired the largest dry dock in the Mediterranean, the Hellenic Shipyards.

In 1952, high-capacity oil supertankers were built for the competing Niarchos and Onassis fleets, who both claimed to own the largest tanker in the world. In 1955, Vickers Armstrongs Shipbuilders Ltd launched the GRT 30708 SS Spyros Niarchos. Then the world's largest supertanker, it was named after Niarchos's second son, Spyros, born earlier that year.

Business flourished and he became a billionaire. In the 1950s and 1960s, Niarchos was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world as a shipowner. His biggest competitor and role model at the time was his brother-in-law, Aristotle Onassis, whose first wife (the sister of his own third wife) later married Niarchos. With his then brothers-in-law Onassis and George Livanos, who also worked as a shipowner, Niarchos was one of the richest men in the world.

Unlike competitors such as the Norwegian Hilmar Reksten or Ravi N. Tikkoo, Stavros Niarchos, like Onassis, relied on a conservative and risk-free business strategy: he only had ships built after long-term, albeit low-yield, transport contracts had been concluded. The growth in assets was therefore comparatively modest.

Stavros Niarchos was a royalist and supported the royal family of Greece even after the end of the monarchy. Among his employees was Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia.

 

Events Participated in

Event	Start	End	Location(s)	Description
Bilderberg/1967	31 March 1967	2 April 1967	United Kingdom St John's College (Cambridge) UK	Possibly the only Bilderberg meeting held in a university college rather than a hotel (St. John's College, Cambridge)
Bilderberg/1968	26 April 1968	28 April 1968	Canada Mont Tremblant	The 17th Bilderberg and the 2nd in Canada

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.