Six Greeks have been featured in BRW’s rich list of Australia’s wealthiest 200 people, released this week.
Con Makris and family lead the pack with a $1.07 billion fortune. When Makris arrived in Australia from Greece 47 years ago his first retail endeavours included fish ‘n’ chip shops and small grocery stores. After selling a chain of chicken shops Makris bought his first shopping centre in Adelaide in the early 1980s.
Today, the Makris family has more than a dozen properties in Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne, and in the past year has sold three neighbourhood shopping centres in Adelaide worth $61 million. Kerry Harmanis, a lawyer who once described himself as a “cocky bastard’ is worth $554 million, though has somewhat faded into obscurity of late.
Harmanis spent three decades in the mining industry before striking his riches when international mining house Xstrata bought his Jubilee Mines nickel operation for $3 billion in late 2007, leaving him to pocket nearly $500 million. The Paspaley family in Darwin, with $540 million from their pearl empire, have invested heavily in the property market, hotels and resorts and have plans to build a $100 million immigration detention centre at Wickham Point, south east of Darwin.
Theo Karedis, at age 75, has a fortune of $487 million. Karedis built up and later sold Theo’s Liquor Chain to Coles Myer for $175 million in 2002 before investing most of this fortune into commercial real estate in Sydney.
The Stamoulis family, with a fortune of $459 million, are continuing to invest the proceeds from the 2004 sale of its Gold Medal softdrink empire into its growing property portfolio, which includes Melbourne CBD office buildings, factories, a golf club in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, an apartment block in Athens and an island in the Ionian sea. After Greek born patriarch Spiros Stamoulis died in 2007 his son Harry now takes care of the family’s assers, including Greek language newspaper Ta Nea and Melbourne radio station 3XY.
64-year-old Greek born George Koukis, worth $326 million, is a work horse who describes sleep as a “waste of time”. After losing a small fortune in the 1987 stockmarket crash Koukis went into business for himself buying the information technology division of a moribund company and refocusing it on developing core banking systems. Today, he directs his interests to a series of start ups in medicine and green technology.