Outline

The FBI did, in fact, wiretap Trump Tower, but they say it was not to monitor Trump. Instead, they claimed they were monitoring a criminal organization that was laundering money from the Soviet Union, through Cyrpus.

Dakis Joannou is a Greek-Cypriot billionaire tycoon who specializes in construction, shipping, distribution and art.

The Joannou family’s core business is construction and concessions through J&P (Overseas), where Dakis Joannou is Chairman and J&P-AVAX, where Christos Joannou is Chairman. The family is also active in shipping, quick service restaurants, real estate development, and hotel ownership and operations, including the Intercontinental Hotel in Athens, and YES Hotels Group, comprising of premium design hotels such as the Semiramis Hotel, designed by Karim Rashid and New Hotel, designed by the Campana brothers.

Dakis Joannou is a major stake holder in the construction company founded by his father and his father’s partner, Joannou & Paraskevaides. The company has been performing major infrastructure projects in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since the 1960’s. Past projects include airports in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan & Oman. They are also heavily involved in the oil & gas industry. In all of these countries, the majority of labor is performed by migrant workers, many of whom are forced in working for very low wages. Many of these workers are slaves.

J&P-AVAX is one of the largest concession owners and operators in Greece owning significant stakes in major motorways, such as Attiki Odos and the Rion-Antirrion bridge, car parks, marinas, social infrastructure PPP projects. The company is also the major shareholder and main contractor of the luxurious Limassol Marina project and has a presence in projects in Cyprus, Romania and Poland. It is part the J&P (Overseas) group, one of the largest construction groups in the Middle East, with more than 40 years of presence in the region and an established brand name.

As such, Joannou has developed a good relationship with royals in the region, especially Qatar.

Dakis Joannou is a majority stake holder in 30+ companies in various industries.

Dakis Joannou is a leading distributor of Coca-Cola in 27 countries through out Europe, Africa and beyond. This includes Russia.

Coca-cola uses their supply-chain experties to help medicines reach remote regions in Africa.

Dakis Joannou’s son, Christos Joannou, serves, or has served, as an executive and/or board member at many of those companies including: Dakis Joannou (Holdings) Ltd., Coca-Cola HBC AG, Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Co. SA. J&P Energy & Industrial Projects SA, Aegean Airlines S.A., Yes SA, Nucorp Hellas SA, Smile SAS, and many more.

Dakis Joannou has been collecting art for over 50 years. He is, without a doubt, one of the most influential art collectors of all time.

Dakis Joannou and artist Jeff Koons have been close friends for over two decades. Jeff Koons curated several art collections on Joannou’s behalf, one of which was called “Skin Fruit.”

Skin Fruit presents work from the Dakis Joannou Collection, curated by artist Jeff Koons. Including over 100 works by 50 international artists, this exhibition at The New Museum in New York is the first presentation of the Dakis Joannou Collection in the United States.

Focusing on the body in contemporary art, the exhibition spotlights the age-old preoccupation with the human form as a vessel of and vehicle for experience. Koons’ title, Skin Fruit, alludes to notions of genesis, evolution, original sin, and sexuality. Skin and fruit evoke the essential tensions between interior and exterior, between what we see and what we consume.

Dakis Joannou owns a yacht, appropriately named “Guilty,” which was designed by Jeff Koons.

The FBI Did Wiretap Trump Tower, But Not to Monitor Trump | NEWSWEEK | MAR 23, 2017

The FBI has said it did wiretap Trump Tower, though its target was not the building’s owner. From 2011 to 2013, two years before Trump announced his presidential campaign, the bureau spied on a Russian crime organization operating on the tower’s 63rd floor.

The FBI had a court-approved warrant to monitor mafia members running what prosecutors described as an “international money-laundering, sports gambling and extortion ring,” ABC News reported

One of the mafia ring’s most senior figures, Vadim Trincher who, oversaw the laundering of tens of millions of dollars from the former Soviet Union through Cyprus and into the U.S, among other criminal activities, Haaretz reported

61 Minutes With Dakis Joannou | NY MAG | FEB 28, 2010 The Greek tycoon hits town for the unveiling of his controversial New Museum show curated by Jeff Koons (who also spruced up his yacht). Dakis Joannou does not seem to be at risk of imminent default. The Greek billionaire owns hotels and a construction business and has been a major international distributor of Coca-Cola, including in Russia, and he is one of the biggest collectors of contemporary art in the world. He has a giant house in Athens and three different vacation homes on three different islands, so he also has the standard Greek billionaire’s 114-foot yacht in order to move comfortably among them. The boat is named Guilty, and two years ago it was painted black and yellow and purple and blue by Jeff Koons in the style of World War I ships whose camouflage was “designed to confuse.” (Joannou’s last yacht, Protect Me From What I Want, took its name from Jenny Holzer.) Koons also made a wedding cake for Joannou’s daughter in 2005. It was shaped like a heart and covered with enormous toppers made of blue and purple marzipan in the shape of children’s party balloons. “We still have them,” Joannou says. “We didn’t eat them. But I suppose we could.” Joannou smiles. He looks like a television version of a kindly gramps, the sort of man who might be cast in commercials hawking oatmeal and Aleve, rather than a guy who once paid $305,000 for a Christopher Wool painting that reads, “If you can’t take a joke, you can get the fuck out of my house.” This week, Joannou’s house is his apartment on the 48th floor of the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. (A publicist accidentally directed me to Olympic Tower, a few blocks south, where the doorman tried to be helpful: “Maybe you mean Niarchos?”) He’s in town for the opening of a show featuring works from his massive collection (1,500 pieces at last guess) as curated by Koons at the New Museum. The minute that news of the exhibit broke, the art world went into high-dudgeon mode over its ethics. “[The New Museum] is supposed to be an independent arbiter of taste and art-historical value,” NYU professor Noah Kupferman told the New York Times in November. “It is not supposed to surrender itself to a trustee and donor whose collection stands to be enhanced in value by a major museum show.” But the show’s many defenders were quick to point out that Joannou is more of a modern-day Medici, albeit a Medici with a taste for bright colors and a sense of humor that tends toward the ironic. What’s more, they say, he rarely resells things from his collection. Dakis Joannou, (& Jeff Koons) Board of Directors | International Center for Missing & Exploited Children | AUG 16, 2007

Dakis Joannou and Jeff Koons have been very close friends for at least 2 decades.

I met up with him at his apartment high up in Trump Tower, where there’s serious-looking earbudded security in the lobby these days. Joannou’s place is a kind of enchanted toy chest, full of the kind of amusingly haunting art he’s often attracted to, starting with the seared, totemic stacked blobs of a Helmut Lang sculpture, arranged like a sinister shish kebab, that you meet when you walk in. “It’s his Joannou tells me that he has owned the apartment since the building was new, in 1983, which is the same year that DESTE was founded, and two years before a young Citibank art-adviser executive named Jeffrey Deitch took him around theOne Ball Total Equilibrium Tank, that he bought for $2,700 from the gallery International With Monument. Joannou’s place is a kind of enchanted toy chest, full of the kind of amusingly haunting art he’s often attracted to, starting with the seared, totemic stacked blobs of a Helmut Lang sculpture, arranged like a sinister shish kebab, that you meet when you walk in. “It’s his entire archive ,” Joannou says, patting it affectionately, and when you look closer, you see on the skewer fabrics and papers and all kinds of things., which is the same year that DESTE was founded, and two years before a youngtook him around the East Village . That’s when he became transfixed by a work by a young artist named Jeff Koons that he bought for $2,700 from the gallery International With Monument. That Time That Donald Trump Wrote Dakis Joannou a Really Nice Note | ARTNEWS | JULY 13, 2016 Today, Interview magazine’s website published a chat between collector Dakis Joannou and writer Linda Yablonsky that took place at the DESTE foundation founder’s longtime New York residence inside Trump Tower. He’s been living in the GOP presidential candidate’s building for some time now. Jeffrey Deitch tells a fun Jeffrey Deitch tells a fun story about using his apartment for office space and bribing security guards in an attempt to get fellow Trump Tower resident Michael Jackson to buy Jeff Koons’s Michael Jackson and Bubbles. (Disclosure: Interview is owned by Brant Publications Inc., which includes in its holdings ARTnews.) The burning question: Has Joannou ever had any contact with his short-fingered vulgarian landlord? Now we know! Check out this juicy tidbit. YABLONSKY: Have you ever met Donald Trump? JOANNOU: Not really. But he sent me a very nice letter for the opening of “Skin Fruit.” It said, “We are very proud to have people like you living in our building,” and so on. [laughs] I’ll have to dig it out now. YABLONSKY: Yes, one day it might be historic! It might be! “Skin Fruit” was a show of Joannou’s collection at the New Museum (where Joannou was a board member), organized by first-time curator Jeff Koons. This show was particularly pilloried by critics

Dakis Joannou | INTERVIEW MAGAZINE | JUL 24, 2016

You’d think an art-besotted industrialist whose construction company helped build the modern Middle East, North Africa, Cyprus, and Greece would have a lust for power. Not Dakis Joannou. The 76-year-old Greek Cypriot happily flouts the rules of typical mogul behavior. When he sails on Guilty, his custom-built, 115-foot art gallery of a yacht—with a razzle-dazzle paint job by Jeff Koons—his passengers are less likely to be fellow captains of industry than the artists and curators he admires. They know Joannou to be a man who thinks more like they do than like a businessman. He’s certainly the polar opposite of the developer who built Trump Tower, where Joannou and his wife, Lietta, have maintained a pied-à-terre since the late 1980s. Joannou has zero interest in politics—he doesn’t even vote—and he hasn’t plastered the family name on any of his six hotels in Athens. Nor does it appear on the foundation he established 33 years ago as DESTE, a Greek word for “look” and an acronym for International and Greek Contemporary Art. Interestingly, he founded DESTE before he started collecting. That happened in 1985, when he bought One Ball Total Equilibrium Tank (Spalding Dr. J 241 Series), by the then little-known Koons. (The discounted price: $2,700.) It changed Joannou’s life. Born in Nicosia, Cyprus, Joannou was schooled in Athens and earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in civil engineering at Cornell and Columbia universities, respectively, before getting a doctorate in architecture at Sapienza University in Rome. In 1967, he returned to Cyprus to join Joannou & Paraskevaides, his father’s construction firm, married Lietta, and had four children. In 1974, when Turkey invaded Cyprus, the family relocated to London and in 1980 settled in Athens, where the couple currently lives in a modernist mansion that Joannou expanded to house his still-growing collection. Among the 600 or so artworks that he rotates in and out of storage are those by the likes of Koons, Ashley Bickerton, Robert Gober, Paweł Althamer, Urs Fischer, Chris Ofili, Charles Ray, Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Maurizio Cattelan and his latest interest, the Los Angeles-based artist Kaari Upson. Art consumes him. Two of his hotels, the Semiramis and the New, were designed by object makers, Karim Rashid and the Campana brothers. He’s also given DESTE a publishing imprint. Among its limited-edition volumes is 1968, a doorstopper that depicts Joannou’s other major collection—radical Italian furniture from the 1960s and 1970s—in photographs that Cattelan and Pierpaolo Ferrari made in the style of Playboy magazines from the period. The cover photo shows a rooster standing on a golden daybed next to a large turd. “That’s real,” Joannou says of the excrement, with the pride of a new father. (Someone else, however, cleaned up the mess.) This spring, the foundation published DESTE 33 Years, a copiously illustrated oral history of the uninhibited, often groundbreaking, exhibitions and projects it has presented since 1983, both in its dedicated spaces in Athens and around the world. In some ways, the book represents Joannou’s counterpunch to the drubbing he received from the American press in 2010, when “Skin Fruit,” an exhibition of works from his collection and curated by Koons, appeared at the New Museum in New York. Because Joannou is on the museum’s board, and because of his close relationship with the artist, critics denounced the show, complaining of conflicts of interest. Joannou was stung by the reaction. “I am not in conflict,” he protests. Not even a little. This June DESTE is celebrating its 33rd anniversary at the Benaki Museum in Athens with “The Equilibrists,” a group show that introduces the work of Greek and Cypriot artists in their twenties and thirties, after the first New Museum triennial, “Younger Than Jesus.” Opening at the same time is a solo show by the Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi at the Slaughterhouse, DESTE’s project space on the Greek island of Hydra. “I think he’s going to do something very strange,” says Joannou. “Something with crabs crawling all over the place.” DESTE 33 Years was sitting on a dining table designed by Urs Fischer when I arrived at Joannou’s Trump Tower apartment to talk about the foundation, his life in art, and his felicitous rapport with artists. The presidential primary campaign was in full swing, and Donald Trump was on the television in the living room, with the sound turned off.

Hillary Clinton Considered CEOs Of Apple, Coca-Cola, GM And Starbucks For VP | HUFFINGTON POST | OCT 18, 2016

WASHINGTON ― Hillary Clinton ’s campaign considered the chief executives of Apple, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Starbucks and Xerox as potential running mates, according to an email that the whistleblowing platform Wikileaks released

The executives were listed alongside nearly four dozen vice presidential candidates that a team of Clinton’s top advisers compiled, including campaign chairman John Podesta, who wrote the March 17 email.

‘Bill Clinton, Inc.’: WikiLeaks Shows Foundation Donors, Personal Cash Overlap | NPR | OCT 27, 2016

A newly revealed memo from a former aide to Bill Clinton details substantial overlap between donors to the nonprofit Clinton Foundation and the former president’s personal financial activities, a $30 million-plus enterprise described in the memo as “Bill Clinton, Inc.”

In 2011, Band formed his own corporate consulting firm, Teneo Strategies, along with another Clinton ally, Declan Kelley. Teneo consulted for several companies that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, including Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and UBS.

Citing health scare, Belgium bans sales of all Coca Cola products | DAILY NEWS | JUN 16, 1999

The Belgian government has banned the sale of all beverages of the Coca Cola Co. following more reported cases of poisoning across the country.

Health Minister Luc Vandenbossche urged Belgians not to drink Coca Cola and such Coca Cola brands as Fanta, Sprite, Aquarius and Bonaqua.

On Monday, 40 students were hospitalized with symptoms of poisoning in Lochristi in west Belgium. Last week, 31 school children became nauseous in the town of Bornem after drinking Coca Cola and were taken to hospital.

Vandenbossche said doctors across Belgium have reported cases of poisoning after people drank Coca Cola products. He said the nature and cause of the poisoning were under investigation.

Commission clears Merger between Hellenic Bottling Company and Coca-Cola Beverages plc, subject to undertakings | EUROPEAN COMMISSION | FEB 08, 2000



The European Commission has authorized the proposed merger of the bottling operations of Hellenic Bottling Company SA (Hellenic) and Coca-Cola Beverages plc (CCB), subject to the parties‘ offering certain commitments. Both CCB and Hellenic are soft drinks bottlers who primarily produce and distribute The Coca-Cola Company‘s beverages in various European countries. In addition, Hellenic holds a 20% stake in Frigoglass SA, a producer of food and beverage (F&B) coolers, which are used primarily to display cooled beverages. In order to resolve competition concerns raised by the proposed transaction, the parties have given the Commission an irrevocable commitment that Hellenic will sell its entire shareholding interest in Frigoglass.

The main focus of the proposed merger is at the bottling level, as the transaction essentially consists of the consolidation of the bottling operations of Hellenic and CCB. Hellenic bottles carbonated soft drinks (CSDs) and other non-alcoholic beverages (NABs) in Greece, the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and certain Eastern European countries. CCB is a UK-based company that bottles CSDs and NABs in Austria, Italy and a number of Eastern European countries. The parties’ operations are thus geographically complementary and the Commission investigation concluded that the operation did not raise significant competition concerns with respect to the bottling of CSDs.

Following the operation, the two companies’ respective parent companies, the Kar-Tess Group (Greece) and The Coca-Cola Company (US) will be the two largest shareholders in the enlarged Hellenic bottling operations. The Kar-Tess Group is a private holding company and The Coca-Cola Company (TCCC) is the world-wide leading owner of branded CSDs, as well as owning several major NAB brands. The new enlarged Hellenic will be designated one of TCCC’s anchor bottlers.

We’re one of the world’s largest bottlers for The Coca‑Cola Company | COCA-COLA HELLENIC

FINANCIALS | COCA COLA HBC AG (CCH)

Coca-Cola HBC operates in 28 countries in 3 continents; its well established markets include Greece, Cyprus, the island of Ireland, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, its developing markets include Poland, the Baltic States, Czech Republic, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary and Croatia. Its emerging markets include Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Ukraine, Belarus, Romania, Montenegro, Armenia, Moldova, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Nigeria.

AG Leventis establishes the Nigerian Bottling Company in 1951

Hellenic Bottling Company SA is incorporated in Greece in 1969

1981 sees Kar-Tess Holding SA, a private holding company, acquire a 99.9 percent interest in Hellenic Bottling Company SA

Coca-Cola in India accused of leaving farms parched and land poisoned | THE GUARDIAN | JUL 25, 2003

Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company (CCH) | WIKINVEST | JUN 30, 2009 Nigeria We believe that we are the largest bottler of non-alcoholic beverages in Nigeria in terms of sales volume, with a 61.2% share of the sparkling beverages category in 2008. Our still and water beverages are leaders in their respective categories, with a 34.5% market share in the juice category and a 61.9% market share in the water category. We and our corporate predecessors have bottled products of The Coca-Cola Company in Nigeria since 1953. At December 31, 2008, we owned 66.4% of our Nigerian bottler, Nigerian Bottling Company plc, with the balance of the shares being publicly held and listed on the Lagos Stock Exchange.

Nigerian Route-to-Market – retail channels and distribution | THE SUPPLY CHAIN LAB | JAN 31, 2013

Is Coca-Cola Company poisoning Nigerians? | NIGERIAN EYE

China environment bureau says Coca-Cola bottling plant falsified pollution data | REUTERS | OCT 22, 2015

Coca-Cola India shuts 3 plants citing inadequate demand | THE ECONOMIC TIMES | FEB 12, 2016

Coca-Cola halts India plant over pollution issue | DAILY MAIL | AUG 19, 2016

Nigerians boycott Coca-Cola drinks after court rules them ‘poisonous’ | CNN | MAR 28, 2017

Coca-Cola call in police to investigate after ‘human waste’ found in cans | INDEPENDENT | MAR 28, 2017

Coca-Cola’s products Sprite and Fanta may be ‘poisonous’, rules Nigeria Court | INDEPENDENT UK | MAR 29, 2017

Anastasios George Leventis | WIKIPEDIA [1] In 1937, he left the firm after it was acquired by the He started trading at the age of 18, and rose to become the general manager of G. B. Ollivant in Ghana In 1937, he left the firm after it was acquired by the United African Company . Leventis then formed his own company and started out as a produce buyer, partly financed by some British cotton manufacturers. oil seed production in West Africa. The situation created the impetus for A.G. Leventis to establish a branch in In the late 1940s, the UK authorities imposed a country by country quota on cotton imported from Africa, which was intended to influence textile andin West Africa. The situation created the impetus for A.G. Leventis to establish a branch in Nigeria , called A.G. Leventis Nigeria Plc . Within a few years the company expanded its business line from cotton exports to merchandise trading. By the 1960s his firm had grown to become one of the largest distributors in Nigeria and one of the largest merchandise traders in the West African region. In Nigeria, he re-structured the business from general trading into a specialized trading firm and established various department stores. During this period, he thrived as a result of the nation’s relatively open economy, as it was not until the 1970s that economic nationalism became a dominant initiative. His marketing style made the Leventis name familiar to many customers in Nigeria..

The Early Years

Anastasios G Leventis was born in December 1902 in the Cypriot mountain village of Lemythou. The earliest records of his family dates back to the 18th century when a young ancestor traveled to the Peloponnese to join in the abortive 1770 uprising against Ottoman rule.

At the end of the First World War the young Anastasios, determined to improve his education and prospects, traveled to visit his elder brother, George, who was already in Egypt and from there took ship to Marseilles, where he first found work and then completed his commercial education at the Ecole Superieure de Commerce in Bordeaux. Through a Marseilles contact he found employment with an Anglo-Greek Manchester-based company in a rural part of south-eastern Nigeria in 1920 and, two years later, with a British company, also based in Manchester, as the manager of their branch in Abeokuta in the south-west of Nigeria.

Rise of an Entrepreneur

Anastasios Leventis was, above all, a dynamic and inspired man of business; his employers, G.B. Ollivants, recognized this at an early stage; by 1928 he was Deputy General Manager in Nigeria and, in 1929, at the age of 26, he was transferred to Accra, capital of the Gold Coast (now Ghana), to take over as General Manager of the company’s business in that country and in Ivory Coast and Togo. The Gold Coast was the most advanced of the British colonies in West Africa and already had an embryonic system of local self-administration, with a Legislative Council at its apex. Anastasios Leventis was chosen by the commercial community as a member of the Legislative Council to represent its interests. He also served as Chairman of the Accra Chamber of Commerce.

The building of an Empire

In the 1930’s Anastasios Leventis left to form his own company, A.G. Leventis & Company Limited, joined by George Keralakis and, a little later, by Christodoulos Leventis, Anastasios’ younger brother.

The new company, although established at the height of the depression, made rapid progress and soon had branches in all parts of the Gold Coast; in 1942 Christodoulos moved to Nigeria to set up branches of the company there. A.G. Leventis and Company Limited was soon to rival the large, long-established trading companies that stood at the heart of the colonial West African economy.

By the time of his death in October 1978, it was one of the largest enterprises and one of the two largest employers in Nigeria and was on the point of expanding into other parts of the world.

Alki David and the Leventis family | THE TIMES UK

The movie Fishtales, starring Billy Zane and Kelly Brook, kept actor and film director David busy last year. The story of a single father falling for a mermaid premiered at Cannes. This year he played the role of Bambas, above, in The Bank Job. David, 39, doesn’t need to make movies for the money: he is a member of the Greek Leventis family. His late father was managing director of the Athens-based Leventis-David group, a family business that owns Coca-Cola bottling plants in 23 countries. Born in west Africa, David was educated at Stowe and Le Rosey in Switzerland. After a short stint in the British Army, he went on to graduate from the… The Richest Greeks in Europe – Greek Rich List 2011/12 | GREEK REPORTER | JUL 15, 2011