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FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE

The New Greek Oligarchy

ALEXANDER CLAPP

The strange saga of a Greek-Russian tobacco tycoon shows how crisis-

era Greece has regressed into a post-Soviet-style oligarchy.

Ivan Ignatyevich Savvidis has played many unusual roles in his life—one of the
great tobacco tycoons of Eurasia, a member of Russia’s Duma, a con dante of
Vladimir Putin —but it is his latest one that is now sounding off alarm bells
throughout Europe. Savvidis is the parvenu of Greece’s oligarchic scene. Since the
onset of the economic crisis, he has effectively seized personal ownership over vast
sectors of Thessaloniki, Greece’s second city and its maritime gateway to the
Balkans. The re sale of old state assets—an auctioning process ordained by the
European Union as part of its enforcement of economic austerity, but which has
become overwhelmingly rigged by vested political interests within Greece—has
given Savvidis a rare opportunity to invest hundreds of millions of euros into his
ancestral homeland. A soccer team, a grand luxury hotel, a tobacco conglomerate, a
water-bottling company, a eet of beach resorts, a television station, a trio of
newspapers, great stretches of coastline and blocs of Thessaloniki real estate, the
port of Salonika and its industrial warehouses: these are but a few of the holdings
that Savvidis has quietly acquired in the last eight years. The buying spree has lately
given rise to a strange new coinage across the newspaper headlines and streets of
his adopted city: Ivanaptiksi, “prosperity emanating from Ivan.”

This slow-motion conquest, taking place hundreds of kilometers from Athens in a

city that makes few international headlines, has now begun to raise serious
questions. How has a man worth $760 million on paper invested close to half of that
amount in Greece in less than a decade? Allegations now being openly raised by the
European press, along with concerns publicly voiced by the American ambassador in
Athens, suggest that Ivan Savvidis is not what he appears to be: Masquerading as
the nancial savior of Thessaloniki, the theory runs, he is in fact a conduit of
Putinist interests in the Aegean.

Seen in this light, virtually all of Savvidis’s business deals and public undertakings
in Greece seem to serve Moscow’s agenda. His dealings with the center-right New
Democracy party—marrying off his niece to its general secretary, pitting its various
clans against one another, peeling off the loyalties of its elected constituents
through purported bribery all across northern Greece—appear an effort to sow
division within the party most bent on Greece’s continued membership in the
European Union. His purchase of Thessaloniki’s port seems a move to stymy NATO’s
naval access to the interior of the Balkans, a region at the convergence of Russian
and American spheres of in uence. The millions of euros Savvidis has donated to
the monasteries of Mount Athos for the construction of new churches act
simultaneously as a Russian investment of soft power in a no-man’s land of
international authority and nancial transparency.

These allegations may just as easily be false, the byproduct of geopolitical

conspiracy mongering and Russia paranoia gone rogue. It would hardly be the rst
time the West’s cottage industry of anti-Putinism has the paradoxical effect of
making Russia’s reach seem far greater than it actually is. But in any case, the
remarkable rise of Ivan Savvidis to a place of political prominence exposes an
uncomfortable truth about the present course of the Greek state. Born in Georgia,
enriched in Russia, Savvidis is an uncanny personi cation of Greece’s regression
from a Western European-style state—the type of country austerity was supposed to
nally hammer into existence—into something much more familiar to observers of
the post-Soviet terrain.

Since the onset of austerity, Greece’s political and economic system has
increasingly given way to a network of regional godfather gures, which probably
has its closest parallel in Ukraine or the Republic of Moldova. This new crop of
oligarchs has used Greece’s economic downturn to sweep up entire economic
sectors, accumulating privatized state assets in everything from airports to
gambling conglomerates to energy utilities. They have then converted this booty
into political in uence by buying up newly-auctioned swathes of the Greek media.
Together, these new oligarchs have succeeded in carving up the crippled Greek state
between themselves. In so doing, they have inadvertently underscored how
Brussels’s fumbling attempts at forging a common foreign policy have been
undermined by its own monetary programs.

The most important thing to understand about Savvidis is that he is nothing like
the oligarchs Greece has seen before. The typical Greek oligarch is not a self-made
man. His family has been wealthy, or siphoning money from the state coffers, or
both, for generations. He inherits a eet of ships, invests minimally within Greece,
then blackmails whatever government happens to be in power by threatening to
pull all his capital out of the country if any attempt is made to audit his assets or tax
him ef ciently. The typical Greek oligarch plays both ends of the political spectrum
slyly and opportunistically. He is Western-oriented. He is based in Athens or Piraeus
or London or Zurich. He functions with the rest of the oligarchs as a class,
strategically marrying his children off to other shipping and industrial families. He
generally pieces together industries within Greece, then divests his pro ts outside
of the country into a diversi ed mercantile empire spanning the Balkans and often
stretching out to Eastern Europe and the Middle East.

Savvidis is something else—to agnosto prosopo, “the unknown face.” A decade ago,
almost no one in Greece had heard his name. He owns no ships. He made his
fortune outside of Greece and is now investing it within the country at an
unthinkably inauspicious time. He is politically obtuse. He makes no attempt to
ingratiate himself with—and, indeed, has provoked a feud with—the leadership of
New Democracy, the party that many expect will come to power in Greece within
the next year. Savvidis has become the loyal instrument of a far-Left government
that climbed to power on promises that it would rein in such gures, but which has
instead given them renewed license to ourish. For Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras,
Savvidis is what’s known as imeteroi — “one of our own,” a gurehead of vast capital
a new government can use to outsource control of different sectors of the sprawling
Greek state. In interviews, Savvidis has compared Tsipras favorably to Putin. He has
warned Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the leader of New Democracy and Tsipras’s political
adversary, that he will never become Prime Minister. Curiously, Savvidis speaks only
a gnarled dialect of ancient Greek, which has curtailed his ability to address his
ambitions in the Greek media. Savvidis has left it up to others to speculate what he
is up to in Thessaloniki.

Most critically, in a country whose oligarchic class has been unwaveringly loyal to
Euro-Atlanticism and American interests since the Second World War, Savvidis is an
upstart from the East. His is a typically shadowy story of post-Soviet self-
enrichment. In 1959, he was born into a large Greek peasant family in the
mountains of southern Georgia. The history of his people, the Pontic Greeks—the
Greeks of the Pontos, or the “deep sea”—is one of generational displacement. The
descendants of ancient Greek colonists to the Black Sea, for centuries they lived on
the northern cusp of Turkey as citizens of the Ottoman Empire. During the great
population exchanges following World War I, most Pontic Greeks were forced to
leave the new nation-state of Turkey. Some “returned” to Greece; others, like the
Savvidis clan, migrated up the shore of the Black Sea and became citizens of
another multinational empire, the Soviet Union. In the late 1930s, Stalin sent
hundreds of thousands of Pontic Greeks out to Central Asia, deeming them fth
columns of imperialism.

Savvidis belongs to those Pontic Greeks who never left the Black Sea. Historically
bounded by empires, not unlike the Georgians and Armenians and Chechens in the
mountains surrounding them, the Caucasus Greeks captured an economic niche
through the cultivation of tobacco. At the age of 14, Savvidis left their company,
heading further up the shore of the Black Sea to Rostov-on-Don, where he rolled
cigarettes on the oor of the Don State Tobacco Factory, took night classes at a local
technical university, performed his military service and earned a reputation as a
highly religious man. “He had always attributed everything to God, ever since he
was sleeping on his best man’s couch in Rostov,” Sonia Prokopidi, a Pontic Greek
who knew Savvidis before he came to Greece, told me in Thessaloniki. (In 2016 in
Prochoma, a village along the Vardar River, Savvidis made a display of his religious
devotion in stone. The fresco on the Church of the Holy Spirit depicts its benefactor,
in the supplicating kneel of a Byzantine saint, decked out in a black power suit,
lifting a relic towards an enthroned Christ. He is anked by his wife and two sons,
all three of whom control various efs within his empire.)

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Savvidis and hundreds of thousands
of other Pontic Greeks embarked on a mass odyssey back to Greece: the rst nation-
state they had known, and yet a place that was effectively foreign to them. (Along
with them would eventually come many others from the ex-Soviet lands, among
them Lasha Shushanashvili, the former treasurer of the Georgian ma a in Europe,
born opposite the Tsalka Mountains from Savvidis in lower Georgia and still at large
in Thessaloniki.) Known for harvesting tobacco in the USSR, in their ancestral
homeland the Pontic Greeks gained a reputation for smuggling it in— rst by shing
trawlers, later by cargo containers. It has never been clear to what extent Savvidis
was involved in this trade, but by the time he returned to Russia just three years
later, he had emerged through the distant end of a murky acquisition scheme as the
owner of Donskoy Tabak, then a middling cigarette company wrangling for control
of the regional market. Rostov, the city to which Savvidis had returned, had become
the proverbial “father of ma as,” an epicenter of post-Soviet turf wars, many waged
over the very commodity routes—out west to the Donbas and lower Ukraine, down
to the Caucasus, on east to the Caspian Sea—that Savvidis would have certainly
known well. A decade later, in 2003, he went to Moscow representing the Rostov
Oblast in the Duma on Putin’s United Russia ticket.

Savvidis spent the decade in between his return to Russia and his debut in the
Duma collecting a diverse constellation of companies, including a sausage
manufacturer, a dairy packaging facility, and a supplier of industrial-grade farm
equipment. But his biding occupation was always Donskoy, which he succeeded in
overhauling into the largest cigarette producer in the former USSR. Some 30 billion
cigarettes, or one in ten smoked in Russia, are annually produced by Donskoy, now
under the formal management of Savvidis’s wife Kyriaki, a fellow Pontic Greek. A
special contract forged with the new Russian state—a deal in which, to this day, the
Savvidis family hands out a billion free cigarettes to the Russian army every year—
granted Donskoy an outsized role in crafting Russia’s new tobacco legislation. On
top of Donskoy, Savvidis acquired a handful of lesser assets, including an airport in
Rostov and a eet of Antonov cargo planes that pump cigarettes out across Central
Asia and North Africa. Donskoy claims to send a disproportionate amount of its six
billion exported cigarettes to three unrecognized statelets along the Black Sea—
Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia—whose net populations amount to fewer
than 800,000 people. Attributing pro ts to these unrecognized pseudo-states
suggests either that Savvidis is earning his money by some other means—cigarette
smuggling has been tepidly raised in the Greek press—or is being funneled it by an
outside player. For the American and European Union of cials who have objected to
his acquisition of the port of Thessaloniki, the suspected culprit is Vladimir Putin.

By the mid-2000s, Savvidis had settled in Thessaloniki and, through a slew of

Cypriot shell companies, begun his investments. He bought the PAOK soccer team,
whose fan base has won him a maniacal personal following as well as a cheap form
of insurance against signi cant investigations into his holdings. (In Greece, as in
Italy and elsewhere, soccer crowds serve as extensions of political bases—a
dangerous constituency for anyone in the press, the judiciary, or the political arena
to provoke.) Savvidis then moved for SEKAP, a deeply-indebted state-owned
tobacco producer out of Thrace whose commercial networks throughout Greece and
the Eastern Mediterranean he has now integrated with the Black Sea networks
commanded by Donskoy. (In June, a shing trawler manned by Ukrainians was
seized off the coast of Crete, en route from Montenegro, carrying millions of
unregistered packets of Savvidis’s Thracian tobacco towards an unknown
destination.) Next, Savvidis took over the Makedonia Pallas, a defunct former
landmark hotel in northern Greece where he now regularly parks his black
Mercedes. At the moment, he is currently attempting to buy Thessaloniki’s port, an
extraordinary strategic asset, through a complicated bidding process that has raised
eyebrows in Greece and drawn scrutiny from the State Department due to the
curious precision of Savvidis’s bid, which managed to just edge out the bid put forth
by the Dubai-based DP World.
The conduit between the crisis that rst enriched Savvidis (the Soviet one) and the
one through which he is currently divesting his wealth (the Greek one) is his ancient
Pontic identity. He has become the gurehead for hundreds of thousands of Pontic
Greeks who, to this day, have never felt properly assimilated into Greece. Savvidis
himself has never learned the language. He lls out his companies with Russians
and Armenians, rarely Greeks. But he has suddenly, improbably, burst into the ranks
of the Greek oligarchy.

For these Greeks, Savvidis is a hero. This past May, I watched as he inaugurated a
new Pontic Greek studies department at Aristotle University in Thessaloniki.
Hundreds of Pontic Greeks sat in attendance. They whipped out their camera
phones en masse as Savvidis—a sturdy, bespectacled man with a trimmed grey beard
and a compact gait—strutted onto a stage cluttered with priests and fuming with
incense. Approaching the podium, he nodded to a clutch of generals and SYRIZA
ministers who had come up from Athens for the ceremony. Savvidis delivered his
speech in Russian through a translator before attempting a small conclusion in
Greek.

“For a long time we were ashamed to be Pontic Greeks. In this place we were
considered foreigners. We were made to feel unwelcome,” he said. “But you should
never feel ashamed to be Pontic Greek again.” Loud applause followed. “His story is
my story,” a woman named Sultana whispered, turning to me. “It’s all of our
stories.”

This is Ivan Savvidis: a man who, through seemingly unlimited resources, has
gained control of Greece’s second city and won a fervent following among a
potential voting bloc of some 400,000 Pontic Greeks—enough, perhaps, to sway a
national election. If the allegations of Savvidis’s connections to Putin are true, they
would con rm in northern Greece what has recently been revealed in Serbia and
Macedonia: namely, that the Kremlin is using expatriate Russian oligarchs and their
obscure nancial networks to buy up state assets and undermine the decision-
making of pro-European governments. That Putin himself has taken at least some
interest in this venture became evident in May 2016, when he and Savvidis made a
highly-touted trip to Aghios Panteleimonas, Russia’s monastic outpost on Mount
Athos which has, in the last two years, been out tted with 500 new rooms and an
assemblage of satellite systems.

Elsewhere in Greece, at the same time as Savvidis takes Thessaloniki, the

consolidation of the state writ large by the new oligarchs proceeds apace, largely
unquestioned. This generation of Greek elites is by no means dirtier than the
previous one. But the crisis has given them extraordinarily free rein to take over,
within the span of a few years and by European Union directive, what it typically
took the previous generation of oligarchs decades to accumulate. With the
exception of the port of Piraeus, which was sold off to the Chinese state last year for
the equivalent of two weeks’ worth of debt relief, every major asset privatized since
2010 has fallen into their hands.

These vulture oligarchs, many of whom—Boris Mouzenidis, Victor Restis—were not

even born in Greece, have exploited the crisis to pick off swathes of real estate and
industrial sectors for pittances. The provenance of most of their capital is at best
suspect, at worst blatantly illegal. Evangelos Marinakis, a Piraeus shipping magnate
with suspected ties to the Greek underground, has now become a major media
player. The family of Dimitris Melissanidis, an oil tycoon with roots in North Ossetia
who has been caught up in allegations of smuggling gasoline and has provided the
U.S. Mediterranean Naval Fleet with its oil since 2003, now lords over OPAP, the
former state-owned gambling conglomerate. A handful of other barons—Dimitrios
Copelouzos, Spiros Latsis—have taken over airports and huge chunks of coastline.
Each of these gures presents exaggerated versions of what Greeks call diaploki, the
nefarious intertwining of government and private interests that austerity has
deepened, not dismantled. But only with Savvidis does a confrontation appear to be
forthcoming. What will happen when SYRIZA is voted out of power? Some speculate
that New Democracy will be forced to move against him. He will present a test—an
opportunity, even—for Mitsotakis, the new party leader widely considered, even by
those within his own party, to be a feeble technocrat.

Others claim that this is not how the Greek state works. Savvidis’s capital is too
badly needed in a city that has been disproportionately ravaged by the crisis. New
Democracy will be forced to accommodate him, just as they would any other
oligarch. Under the guise of performing a house-cleaning of the Greek
economy, Brussels will continue to push the relentless privatization of assets that
has afforded oligarchs like Savvidis the cover for quiet state capture.

One can already imagine EU of cials of the future puzzling over the rotted state of
Greece, wondering how it could have ever happened again.
Published on: January 5, 2018

Alexander Clapp is a journalist based in Athens. His work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement and The
National Interest.