Gold Magazine May - June 2013, Issue 26 | Página 34

PROFILE

The bailout should be seen as an
opportunity to change Cyprus for the
better, says Moscow-based Cypriot
business consultant Markos Shiapanis.
By John Vickers.
Photograph by Jo Michaelides.

arkos Shiapanis is a fascinating character. A Cypriot from Famagusta, he
studied theatre and film
direction in Moscow but
today, 44 years later, he
spends much of his time
advising Europeans wishing to invest in Russia to
do so through Cyprus.
How he got to this point
is, he says, a long story.
“I was studying drama
but, to help pay for my
studies, I was also helping
various Cypriot businessmen who had dealings with the Soviet
Union, as well as working as a translator for groups of Greek and
Cypriot tourists to the Soviet Union. It was at this time that I became interested in tourism and I was planning to return to Cyprus
and work in the tourism business but things didn’t go according to
plan due to the 1974 coup and invasion.”
Instead of Cyprus, Shiapanis went to Greece and, with two others, made his first documentary film, Cyprus ’74. In 1975 he began
promoting student travel between Greece and the Soviet Union:
“Thousands of people wanted to see what was going on there since
it had been closed for years to the outside world. There were also
150,000 Greeks who had emigrated to the USSR and they started
traveling in the opposite direction so it was a very good business.”
Despite devoting time to his first – and last – major theatre
production (of Sophocles’ Electra, starring Aspasia Papathanasiou)
in 1975, Markos Shiapanis has been involved in business with
the Soviet Union and later Russia ever since. “With the advent
of Perestroika, I began holding management seminars for Russian
businessmen and when the USSR was replaced by the Russian

34 Gold the international investment, finance & professional services magazine of cyprus

Federation, I established the MIBS (Moscow International Business Services) Group and started the first movement of Russians to
Cyprus.”
For 20 years Shiapanis’ main business was real estate. “From
1992-96, Russians were buying properties in Limassol mainly and
later in Paphos,” he recalls. “But after the first and second Russian
crises in 1996 and 1998 I decided to change direction, again spending
more time on tourism and consultancy, which is now my main business: advising companies – in Europe mainly – to bring their money
through Cyprus to invest in Russia.”
In the past few years, the Russian community in Cyprus has grown
enormously. Shiapanis thinks he knows why:
“Russians feel that Cyprus is very close to them. Russian and Greek
are similar languages in many ways, we have a similar culture and we
share the same religion. The Russians and Ukrainians like us and trust
us, and this is extremely important. The number of Russian