John Christodoulou

For his 40th birthday, he acquired a private jet and, when he turned 50, Christodoulou increased the size of his yacht from 50 metres to 74.5 meters.

He has a $50 million 74m yacht, Zeus, previously owned by Aidan Barclay.

He is a supporter of Omonia Nicosia football club.

His favourite drink is Zivania.

The property entrepreneur is also dyslexic and accordingly has a preference for making business decisions over the phone, an in-house solicitor for Yianis Group has told London's High Court.

Christodoulou is also a friend of Monaco's Prince Albert.

Yiannakis Theophani "John" Christodoulou (born 24 May 1965) is a Monaco-based British billionaire property developer, the owner of Yianis Group, a privately held company with a portfolio of residential, hotel, retail and leisure properties in the UK and Europe.

His Yianis Group employs over 7,000 people in the UK alone.

Through Yianis Group, Christodoulou is reportedly one of England's biggest freeholder landlords.

Christodoulou was born on 24 May 1965 in Nicosia, Cyprus.

He came to London as a boy in 1974, as his family fled the Turkish invasion of Cyprus.

Aged 9 when Christodoulou found refuge in the UK, his father declined a council flat, forgoing the security of a lifelong tenancy for renting in a safer neighbourhood to protect him.

Christodoulou's refugee background had an impact on his outlook on life and approach to business: "I know what it is like to leave your home and have nothing else. What made me the man I am today is going through the experience of a war and being insecure. I'm still insecure. I can use it as a positive because it's never enough, you always need challenges in life."

After leaving school at 16, Christodoulou trained to become a diamond mounter before acquiring his first property in 1994.

He began his business career in Hatton Garden, starting off as a diamond mounter

and then 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.

Within three years, Christodoulou had sold his own diamond business.

Christodoulou then moved into the building trade by taking jobs on construction sites before developing his own buildings with bank finance.

He started at 19 with a studio flat in Finchley, north London, and now owns property in London Docklands through his Yianis Group.

With circa 2 million square foot of property, Christodoulou is the second largest freeholder in Canary Wharf after Canary Wharf Group, which is jointly owned by Canadian private equity firm Brookfield and the Qatar Investment Authority.

Christodoulou owns 100% of Yianis Group, which owns the London hotels Marriott Canary Wharf and the Canary Riverside Plaza (formerly Four Seasons Canary Wharf).

He also owns heritage asset Wool House, a grade II listed former Victorian warehouse in Whitechapel.

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.

Christodoulou won the "Foreign-based Cypriot Entrepreneur of the Year 2013" award from IN Business Magazine.

Christodoulou is the president of the Monaco and Cyprus Jubilee Sailing Trust.

In June 2022, he was awarded a Goodwill Ambassador Award of the Principality of Monaco.

Christodoulou received the Holy Humanitarian Cross of the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus in July 2022, while in August 2022 he was awarded the Medal of Outstanding Contribution in a ceremony organised by the Presidency of the Republic of Cyprus.

In November 2023, Christodoulou was awarded by the Cypriot government for his charitable work and for his efforts to promote Cyprus abroad during a ceremony in London at the World Travel Market conference.

Christodoulou is involved in philanthropic endeavours.

According to the Sunday Times Rich List, Christodoulou became a billionaire in 2015.

In May 2023, his fortune was estimated at £2.45 billion, ranking him as the 74th-richest person in the UK.

Inspired by his own childhood, displaced from his homeland as a child, in 2016 he founded the Yianis Christodoulou Foundation (YCF), which seeks to support disadvantaged children and their families in the UK and abroad, with a special focus on poverty alleviation and education.

Christodoulou has donated £1 million to the eponymous philanthropy organisation.

The charity commenced in 2017 with donations of £51,842 and in 2018 donations totalled £1,200,559.

In 2019, it was reported that the Cyprus-born British freehold tycoon was working on an eco-friendly development on an island off Sardinia.

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.

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.

Christodoulou is a critic of Cyprus' lengthy planning process, stating that it is stopping foreign investment.

As of May 2023, his estimated net worth is £2.45 billion, according to the Sunday Times Rich List 2023.

Christodoulou lives in Monaco with his wife and four children.