John Christodoulou

Yiannakis Theophani "John" Christodoulou (born 24 May 1965) is a Monaco-based British billionaire property developer, the owner of Yianis Group, a privately owned company with a portfolio of residential, hotel, retail and leisure properties in the UK and Europe.^[5] As of May 2021, his estimated net worth is £2 billion.

Early life[]

Christodoulou was born on 24 May 1965^[1] in Nicosia, Cyprus.^[6] He came to London as a boy in 1974,^[7] as his family fled the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

Career[]

After leaving school at 16, Christodoulou trained to become a diamond mounter before acquiring his first property in 1994.^[8] He began his business career in Hatton Garden, persuading the landlord of a small jewelers to allow him to occupy a workshop by accepting cut-price jewellery repairs as a form of rental income.^[6][9] Christodoulou then moved into the building trade by taking jobs on construction sites before developing his own buildings with generous bank finance.^[6]

He started with a studio flat, and now owns extensive property in London Docklands through his Yianis Group.^[10]

Christodoulou owns 100% of Yianis Group, which owns the London hotels Marriott West India Quay and the Canary Riverside Plaza (formerly Four Seasons Canary Wharf).^[5] He also owns heritage asset Wool House, a grade II listed former Victorian warehouse in Whitechapel.^[5]

In 2012, several overleveraged hotel-owning Yianis Group interests that came under the Dania Properties name went into administration, which saw Christodoulou lose the grade 2-listed 148 bedroom hotel Marriott Victoria & Albert Hotel in Manchester and the four-AA-star, 895-bedroom Park Inn by Radisson located close to Heathrow Airport.^{[11][12][13][14]}

The value of Christodoulou's property holdings increased by 25% in the 12 months to April 2019 to £1.5 billion, due to a buoyant London rental market.^[15]

As of May 2021, his net worth is £2 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2021.^[7]

In October 2021, Christodoulou had been set to take over Cypriot professional football club Omonia Nicosia from current major stakeholder Stavros Papastavrou, a New York-based Cypriot investor, in a £30 million deal, but talks reportedly broke down over the issue of him having to sell the shares on to Omonia fans after five years, one of at least two clauses in the original management deal with Papastavrou that Christodoulou had sought to scrub.^[16]

Personal life[]

Christodoulou lives in Monaco with his wife and four children.^[3] He has a $50 million 74m yacht, Zeus, previously owned by Aidan Barclay.^[17]

Charity[]

Yianis Christodoulou Foundation[]

Christodoulou is involved in philanthropic endeavours. Inspired by his own childhood, displaced from his homeland as a child, he founded the Yianis Christodoulou Foundation (YCF),^[18] which seeks to support disadvantaged children and their families in the UK and abroad. The charitable foundation has a special focus on poverty alleviation and education.

Christodoulou has donated £1 million to the eponymous philanthropy organisation.^[19]

The charity commenced in 2017 with donations of £51,842 and in 2018 donations totalled £1,200,559. Fundraising fell significantly in 2019, with just £17,756 raised. In 2020 donations totalled £15,238. Charitable grants made to date are: £260,998 (2018), £112,039 (2019) and £93,199 (2020).^[20]

The property magnate has also hosted high-profile fundraising events, such as the 2017 Star Ball at the Hilton Manchester Deansgate where apparently over £1.5 million was raised.^[21] It is unclear whether this sum is separate to the £1 million said to have been donated by Christodoulou as the accounts filed with Companies House indicate donations/funds raised since 2017 total £1,285,395.^[22]

In December 2018, Christodoulou's foundation ran a Christmas card competition, with the cash prizes going to a number of Cyprus primary schools for teaching resources and new infrastructure.^[23]

COVID-19

The Yianis Christodoulou Foundation funded the distribution of free food packages offered to the homes of 355,000 members of the Cypriot community in the UK for the in need, vulnerable and elderly during the COVID-19 pandemic.^[24] YCF distributed 6,107 International Workers' Day appreciation energy snack-packs to health professionals and workers across all public hospitals in Cyprus.^[25] The eponymous philanthropy organisation also funded 6,000 individual care packs for the NHS staff at The Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel, London.^[26]

Honours and awards[]

Christodoulou won the Foreign-based Cypriot Entrepreneur of the Year 2013 award from IN Business Magazine.^[27][28]

Christodoulou is the president of the Monaco and Cyprus Jubilee Sailing Trust.^[29]

Controversies[]

Christodoulou's business practices have attracted considerable media attention. The Times notes that "his company has been challenged by residents of a luxury development of more than 300 flats who complained they were being charged sky-high service charges and unreasonably high sums for repairs."^[3] This is a reference to Canary Riverside, where Christodoulou was stripped of day-to-day management control over the property in October 2016, with a professional court appointee installed to act in the best interests of the site. Leaseholders were able to prove fault against CREM, a subsidiary company,^[30][31][32] that they had suffered over many years due to poor management of the estate, in particular a lack of transparency surrounding how their money was being used.^[33] Tribunal judges found that the managing agent Marathon Estates (a company set-up in 2011 by Richard Paul, a chartered accountant and partner at accountancy firm Nyman Libson Paul, to manage the Christodoulou-owned estates of Canary Riverside and 1 West India Quay) ”has been unable to produce accurate financial information on time, including budgets and accounts, has not engaged with leaseholders and has a muddled hierarchy of command."^[34]

Similar complaints of estate mismanagement by Christodoulou leaseholders at 1 West India Quay have emerged in a Sunday Times feature on the so-called leasehold property scandal.^[33] Leaseholders there have taken legal action against Christodoulou over expensive energy bills, raising concerns that they have been subsidising his commercial interest on the site.^[33][35] In May 2014, they won the right to form a recognised residents' association, despite Christodoulou having hired a QC and spent £74,000 in trying to block their efforts.^[36]

Christodoulou has also been named in parliament, with former MP for Poplar and Limehouse Jim Fitzpatrick claiming that the litigation and threats faced by the court-appointed manager at Canary Riverside are "little short of harassment".^[37] A former secretary of the 1 West India Quay residents' association has been subjected to a defamation threat by Christodoulou's lawyers, as have 100 leaseholders at neighbouring Canary Riverside.^[34] In July 2018, his lawyers unsuccessfully sought to prevent the then local MP, Jim Fitzpatrick, from raising the case of Canary Riverside in parliament. It had been claimed that Fitzpatrick's intervention could breach sub judice rules.^[38]

In April 2020, The Guardian reported that tenants at Olympic House, Simpson House and St John's Court in Somerford Grove, east London, were denied a 20% rent cut, in spite of the COVID-19 pandemic and their allegedly precarious employment situations. The renters are said to have been told by the lettings agent, acting on behalf of the three corporate landlords all “majority owned” by Christodoulou, that the request was “unreasonable” and “unrealistic”.^[39] The agent had suggested that “any drop in tenants’ income would be minimised by a reduction in spending on holidays, entertainment, travel, clothes and lunches.” London mayor Sadiq Khan tweeted: “This is a prime example of how unrealistic it is to expect landlords & tenants to sort difficulties out amongst themselves,” and that the story is “exactly why” he is calling on government to “introduce immediate measures to protect tenants who go into arrears” because of the public health emergency.^[40] These tenants formed an advocacy group Somerford Grove Renters with the London Renters Union.^[41] They were later threatened with legal action by the lettings agent and alleged harassment and surveillance by agent-hired security guards.^[42] After continuing to make public statements about the situation, several tenants received eviction notices in August in what Hackney Mayor Philip Glanville called a "revenge eviction" and "a direct response to [the tenants] seeking greater security for themselves and their neighbours at a time of crisis."^[43]

On 21 September 2020, around 70 rental and leasehold tenants protested outside Canary Riverside Plaza, which is part of the upmarket mixed use Canary Riverside scheme owned by the Yianis Group, to push back against unfair practices by Christodoulou and the government's ending of the eviction ban. Joined by local MP Apsana Begum, the protesters hand-delivered a letter to the Yianis Group headquarters.^[44][45]

On 9 November 2020, former shadow home secretary Diane Abbott tabled an early day motion in parliament urging John Christodoulou to negotiate "fair and reasonable rent adjustments" with affected tenants in Somerford Grove. It noted that "far from entering into negotiations, residents have been harassed and spied on".^[46]

In July 2021, it was reported that a tribunal had ordered Christodoulou to compensate four of his former tenants in Somerford Grove £19,000 for renting them properties as illegal HMOs.^[47]

Christodoulou has been described as a "tax exile",^[48] and for a number of years lived in the UK enjoying the controversial non-domiciled tax status.^[3] He left the UK shortly before then chancellor of the exchequer Alistair Darling was to introduce a new £30,000 a year charge on nondoms who have lived in the country for more than seven years.^[49] In October 2021, The Times newspaper reported that the low-profile billionaire property tycoon had covertly claimed millions of furlough money from the taxpayer despite telling a London audience that he was self-reliant through the crisis and criticising those businesses which did need government assistance. Christodoulou’s use of shell and foreign incorporated companies to secure up to £6.5 million in taxpayer money occurred despite his public comment that “we borrowed no money from the government … because it shows the wrong sign.”^[50] In the coronavirus pandemic, Christodoulou’s wealth increased by £250 million according to the Sunday Times Rich List and, in October 2021, it was reported that the Cypriot expat businessman bought football club Omonia Nicosia from current major stakeholder Stavros Papastavrou, a New York-based Cypriot investor, in a £30 million deal.

References[]