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).

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.”

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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

A Fool for Art | THE NEW YORKER | NOV 12, 2007

Jeffrey Deitch and the exuberance of the art market.

A wave of new American and European collectors, many of them youngish hedge-fund managers, has driven auction prices to unprecedented, almost unimaginable levels—$104 million for Picasso’s “Boy with a Pipe,” at Sotheby’s in 2004—and even higher prices have been registered in private sales. (The billionaire hedge-fund owner Steven A. Cohen is said to have paid $143.5 million last year for a painting by Willem de Kooning.) More recently, money pouring in from non-American sources—Russian oligarchs, mysterious collectors in Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, and South Korea—has pushed prices even higher, and confirmed the ever-expanding art market as a global enterprise.

A huge portion of the new money in this market is being spent on contemporary art…

Clinton Event Produces Support for Road Safety, Clean Water, and Other Global Issues | PHILANTHROPY | SEP 23, 2010

A $3.75-million grant from the Coca-Cola Company to start eight water projects in Morocco, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and other African countries that have large Muslim populations. The grant is part of a $7.5-milion project that is also being supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.N. Development Program.

”Guilty” by Ivana Porfiri for Dakis Joannou | YATZER | OCT 03, 2008

Dakis Joannou is a Greek Cypriot industrialist and one of the leading collectors of European contemporary art. The earliest work in his collection is from 1985 and the latest one is his own yacht which name is Guilty, a project of Ivana Porfiri and exterior camouflage design by Jeff Koons. 

Dakis Joannou’s Guilty Pleasure | NOWNESS | MAR 7, 2010

The Yacht That Koons Designed

Too Big to Sail? | VANITY FAIR | OCT 13, 2010

The financial crisis sent panic through the world of super-yachts, with over-leveraged tycoons abandoning ship, and sales in a deep freeze. Two years later, the author delves into the motives, means, and lifestyles of the oligarchs, operators, and sea-lovers who are still riding the waves. Choose your vessel: from the naked aggression of Roman Abramovich’s record-size Eclipse, the floating advertisement of the Candy brothers’ Candyscape II, and the eye-popping Jeff Koons exterior of Dakis Joannou’s Guilty to the pure romance of Tara Getty’s historic Blue Bird.

Last Mile Project for Medicines | CLINTON GLOBAL INITIATIVE | 2013

In 2013, the Coca-Cola Company committed to working over two years with partners, including the Last Mile Project, to create consistent availability of medical resources in hard-to-reach areas of Tanzania and Mozambique. The focus of the partnership is to systematically extract learning from Coca-Cola’s successes and approaches in supply chain and marketing in these areas; thereby building significant capability within entities that distribute critical medicines on behalf of Ministries of Health across Africa. As a result, these entities will be able to significantly improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their organizations as they significantly improve availability of critical medicines throughout the markets they serve.

The Collection As a Dialogue | ART TERRITORY | MAY 05, 2014

Jeffrey Deitch Defends Klaus Biesenbach and Björk Retrospective | ARTNET | MAR 26, 2015

One last detail we’ll regale you with involved Michael Jackson, Kehinde Wiley, and the billionaire industrialist and owner of a Jeff-Koons-designed yacht Dakis Joannou and his pied–à–terre at Trump Tower.

When he started his own business, one of his long time clients, Dakis Joannou, had a small apartment in Trump Tower that “he wasn’t really using.”

“I said how about a barter deal,” said Deitch. “Art advisory services in exchange for using your apartment. He said, ‘of course.’ That was one of the ways I started my business with no money.”

At some point during Deitch’s barter deal, Michael Jackson was making an album in New York and spent six months in a Trump Tower apartment. “It was amazing to see him come in,” said Deitch. “Late at night, he’d come from the studio. He worked very hard.”

As Deitch told it, he was working with Jeff Koons at the time and bribed one of the doormen to put a copy of a Jeff Koons’s catalogue in his apartment, the one with Koons’s 1988 sculpture Michael Jackson and Bubbles on the cover.

“’When you get access to the apartment,’” said Deitch recalling what he said to the doorman, “’could you leave this Jeff Koons catalogue with Michael Jackson and Bubbles on the cover with this note from me?’ The note said, ‘we would like to sell to you this sculpture of you.’”

Eli Broad ended up buying it. But years later, Deitch heard again from Jackson when the pop star got interested in the work of Kehinde Wiley.

Moroccan cash flows to Clinton Foundation | POLITICO | APR 8, 2015

The Clinton Foundation is expected to announce additional sponsors for the Marrakech event when it formally announces the meeting lineup in the coming days. But its preliminary list of expected attendees includes executives from OCP and Coca-Cola, as well as the presidents of Rwanda and Tanzania and senior officials from the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and the League of Arab States.

Clinton Foundation Taking Money From Accused Rights Violator | ABC | MAY 6, 2015

The Moroccan government-owned mining company OCP operates in disputed international territory in a remote part of the Saharan Desert and the firm has been criticized for removing the resources without adequately compensating the impoverished people who live there.

When thanking Morocco for its hospitality, the former American president heralded the country’s potential, proclaiming that it is “the Saudi Arabia of Phosphate.”

Despite the swirling controversy, the three-day conference in Morocco, long in the works, went ahead as scheduled this week. Held in an oasis of golf greens and palm trees secluded from the din and packed crowds of the exotic Marrakech central square, several dozen top Clinton Foundation members were scheduled to spend three uninterrupted days of panel discussions, breakout sessions and opportunities to speak with President Clinton and an assortment of world leaders. Among other sponsors of the event are the Akwa Group, a Moroccan oil and gas firm, Channel IT, a Nigerian telecom company, and Coca-Cola and APCO Worldwide, one of Washington’s biggest lobbying firms which has long provided public relations services for the Clinton Foundation, free of charge.

Jeff Koons Jets Off to Greece to Ride Billionaire Dakis Joannou’s “Guilty” Yacht | ARTNET | JUL 21, 2015

Later this month, he told T magazine that he’ll be jetting off to Corfu, Greece to hang out on the yacht he designed for Greek billionaire and art collector Dakis Joannou in 2013.

What exactly does this 115-foot luxury seacraft look like, you ask? In a 2013 Forbes article that begins with the polite observation, “there have always been charges of excess in the art world,” the ship is described as a Lichtenstein-esque creation comprised of bold geometric designs.

It was reportedly inspired by Razzle Dazzle, the British naval camouflage from World War I that was intended to confuse the viewer. If you’re looking at it from a bird’s eye view, there’s a massive picture of Iggy Pop, who Koons regards as a “contemporary Dionysus figure.”

“We did what we wanted; style was irrelevant,” Joannou told Forbes. “We designed a boat in an antistyle method. We have no rules, no programs, no plans.”

The yacht, one of several owned by Joannou, goes by the name of “Guilty,” and once had to be wrapped in paper to guard against a swarm of paparazzi in Italy. Word is Joannou doesn’t use it too often. Except, of course, when he’s hitting the high seas with its visionary designer.

As art dealers and gallerists in Greece struggle to stay afloat, it appears Joannou is doing just fine.

Dakis Joannou’s Art Addiction | VULTURE | JUN 17, 2016

In the introduction to a new 856-page chronicle of his art-world life over the past 33 years, the Greek Cypriot collector Dakis Joannou writes that “when people ask how I define DESTE’s program” — DESTE is the name of his art foundation — ”I respond that I do whatever I want.” He also writes that “I am a prisoner of my own curiosity. An addict, perhaps.”

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!

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.

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.

Coca-Cola Hellenic Bottling Company (CCH) | WIKINVEST | JUN 30, 2009

Anastasios George Leventis | WIKIPEDIA

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