BRW’s Rich 200 List Includes 6 Greeks

This week, BRW released its rich list of Australia’s wealthiest two-hundred people which included six Greeks.

Con Makris is the first of them with a $1.07 billion fortune. Makris arrived in Australia from Greece 47 years ago and he first established 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.

The Paspaley family in Darwin, with $540 million from their pearl empire, have invested heavily in the property market, hotels and resorts and now have plans to build a $100 million immigration detention centre at Wickham Point, south east of Darwin.

Harmanis had been in the mining industry for three decades before striking it rich when international mining house Xstrata bought his Jubilee Mines nickel operation for $3 billion in 2007, leaving him to pocket nearly $500 million.

Theo Karedis 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, is continuing to invest the proceeds from the 2004 sale of its Gold Medal soft drink empire into its growing property portfolio. Their property 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.

George Koukis, with a fortune of $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.