SPEAKER: STELIOS HAJI-IANNOU

Easy Group Chairman

Born in Athens on February 14th 1967, he is the second son of Loucas Haji-Ioannou, a Greek shipowner. In 1987 he graduated from the London School of Economics and a year later he took a masters degree from the City of London Business School. At the age of 21 he joined his father's shipping company and at the age of 25 established his own shipping company, Stelmar Tankers, which has offices in Athens and London.

In November 1995, at the age of 28, he launched easyJet, a no-frills airline which now has bases in London Luton, Liverpool and Geneva, and operates twenty seven routes across Europe. The airline is in the process of investing $2 billion in brand new aircraft and is committed to flying passengers at good value prices in one of the world's youngest fleets.

In June 1999, Stelios opened another business, easyEverything, the world's largest Internet café, in central London. easyEverything offers consumers fast and best value access to the Internet 24 hours a day. Four more central London sites will be open by the end of 1999, followed by other UK cities and Amsterdam.

Stelios has also announced further companies within the easyGroup in the form of easyRentaCar and easyMoney which will continue in the mould of using information technology to re-engineer business processes and provide goods and services to consumers at vastly reduced prices. easyRentaCar will be an online car rental service using a uniform fleet of vehicles and offering car rental from £9 a day. easyMoney, online financial services, will eliminate the existing real estate costs from this industry, again reducing costs to customers.

Stelmar and all of the companies within the easyGroup are "paperless" which allows Stelios to run these companies from wherever he is in the world through his laptop