Champion of cheap seats

It's 8pm on a cold, wet evening and inside easyGroup's GHQ, a tatty converted piano factory in Camden, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, his plump knees wedged under his low, cluttered desk, is firing off a final few e-mails. 'Would you like a soft drink?' he enquires, heading to a vending machine and shovelling in coins. A bottle of water clonks out. Oh, the glamour. The hub of Stelios's myriad businesses has the air of a cashstrapped internet start-up. It's furnished with a couple of hard, electric blue, sub-Ikea benches for visitors and decorated with pinboards covered with photographs of staff parties. The metal pillars supporting the ceiling are painted Easy's signature Fanta orange. And this is positive luxury compared with the airline offices: easyJet plc may employ 4,000 people and be worth £1.3 billion but its HQ , says Stelios, is 'a giant Portakabin in Luton'.

Conspicuous scruffiness is all part of the corporate message of frill-free cost cutting. It's one dear to Stelios's own heart: you would be very hardpushed to pick him out as a billionaire. 'You shouldn't be able to tell if I'm above average wealth or not,' he says. He's got a stubbly chin and a face that's reminiscent of Fred Flintstone's, and he's dressed in a purple Thomas Pink shirt, bought from Heathrow (the only place he has time to shop), baggy suit trousers and a Swatch watch with, yes, an orange strap.

'I'm proud of my Swatch and I wouldn't wear anything else,' he says, even though he also owns a Patek Philippe. 'It says something about my character.'

It was Stelios who made cheap travel socially acceptable. When he first launched easyJet from Luton in 1995, he made the first two destinations the far-from-budget South of France and Geneva. 'That touched a segment of the population that is of a very high socio-economic class but felt smart not wasting money when they're travelling for pleasure. In the early days, I saw some extremely wealthy people on the flight and that's what helped it become more socially acceptable.' Soon everyone from the Blairs downwards was taking it Easy. 'It's not embarrassing to be seen to be pursuing low-cost products or services.'

Stelios has bowed out of direct involvement with the airline (though he still owns 17 per cent of the shares), but it's this attitude he's banking on. He's building up his portfolio with new ventures aimed at the cost-conscious: easyCar, easyInternetcafé, easyDorm (a budget hotel chain), the soon-to be launched easyBus, and easyPizza and easyCruise which are still in the pipeline - plus a telecom business which will, you bet, be called easyPhone.

And that isn't all. 'I'm increasingly in a position where people come to me with very specific, well-thought-out ideas,' he says. 'I've been getting crazy ideas for years.' (EasyBoobs, budget plastic surgery, being one.) 'But more recently, I've been getting serious approaches from companies with significant networks who want to use the Easy brand.' Is he spreading himself a bit thin? 'I'm doing portfolio diversification. Even if one of the businesses doesn't do very well, I'm so diversified, I won't go bankrupt.' The point, he says, is to extend the Easy brand to all sorts of businesses which will have 'yield management' in common --early sales mean cheaper prices.

This even, apparently, works with pizza. ' Getting people to order it a day ahead would be a start,' he explains. 'Otherwise you have all these resources sitting there unused for most of the day except for a two-hour window.' What he really wants to talk about, though, is easyCinema, at the moment a single outlet in Milton Keynes, but soon, if Stelios has anything to do with it, to encompass the Coronet in Notting Hill. EasyCinema is run along the same principles as the other Easy enterprises: book early, get discounted tickets (50p a seat) and don't expect any food.

The trouble is, the film distributors don't like the idea of tickets to brand-new blockbusters going cheap and have so far refused to supply the Milton Keynes cinema with films in the first month of their release. So Stelios feels the need for a high-profile London cinema which will make it harder for the film companies to refuse. Hence, earlier this month, he joined well-heeled Notting Hill residents, including Joseph Fiennes, Stephen Frears and the producer Julian Ozanne, protesting about the sale of the 105-year-old Coronet to a casino or, as is now rumoured, an evangelical church.

Never one to miss a photo opportunity, Stelios turned up waving an orange banner and handing out cheap sunglasses to the assembled fur-coated ladies who were thrilled to be on their first protest march. 'It was very touching,' says Stelios. 'People I'd never met before, who appeared to be very wealthy, were coming up saying, "Good luck, we want you to succeed."'

Stelios loves to be loved and, by the general public at any rate, he is. 'What we do is to offer something to people that they enjoy and appreciate. There are many ways to make money - you can sell arms, tobacco, drugs and you're harming people and you're always the enemy. The opposite of that is a person who says, "I will give the consumers what they really like."'

The roots of his desire for approval lie in his background. Stelios was born in Athens to a wealthy Greek-Cypriot couple, Loucas and Nedi. His father, the eldest of 13 from a village in Cyprus, built up his Troodos shipping company from scratch into one of the world's biggest tanker operations. Stelios was always expected to join the business. 'My father was grooming me for it. I remember being in his office as young as ten or 11.'

At 17, Stelios went to the LSE to study economics, but was expected to pop into the London office of Troodos Shipping for meetings. 'There was a time when I thought I would live and die in the shipping business.' By the age of 24, he was Troodos's CEO. And then, in April 1991, one of his father's ships, the Haven, exploded off Genoa, killing five people and polluting the Italian coast. Stelios and his father faced charges of manslaughter and were tried three times by the Italian courts before being found not guilty. 'It's a disappointing way for my father to end an illustrious career,' says Stelios. 'He created such a big company in his life, employed thousands of seafarers and carried fuel for millions of homes. Then there was an accident and everybody decided he was a villain. I didn't like that equation, so I set out to change it. I wanted to build a reputation and a rapport with the public before I needed it.'

He started easyJet with £5 million of his family's money in the middle of the court cases, keen to be seen as a public hero. 'Proving myself to my father was an important consideration in the early stages. I never had to work to live. You can sit on your arse, enjoy the inheritance and spend your way through life or you can do something useful.' (His elder brother, Polys, has taken over at Troodos, while his younger sister, Clelia, is a passive shareholder in her family's various businesses. 'You have to remember, this is Greece,' says Stelios, excusing the sexism.) The luminous orange logo was chosen because no other airline was using that colour at the time; as for the name, Stelios remembers going to Harry's Bar and scribbling 'CheapJet', 'No-FrillsJet' and other such variations until he came up with Easy. After that, it was, well, easy. The airline took off, and, by 2002, his personal wealth was being estimated at around £600 million. Attempts to diversify have not been so successful: last year, losses in his easyInternetcafés rose to nearly £96 million, and £13.6 million at easyCar. But Stelios insists that the company has turned the corner: his shares have gone up 75 per cent in the past year, and he is expecting the internet cafés and the car-rental business to break even this year. 'I've learned a lot,' he says of the internet café debacle. 'We raised a lot of money from the computer makers - people were just throwing money at us. So I said, "Let's put 20 internet cafés in two continents in 18 months." That was crazy. With easyCinema, I'm taking more careful steps.'

Nevertheless, he's still got plenty of millions left to spend on himself. It would be a mistake to think of Stelios as a Calvinist. True, he takes no salary from his companies, but he likes to eat out at Mark's Club, the Mayfair restaurant owned by Mark Birley, and lives in one of London's swankiest hotels when he's over here - he won't say which, for fear of being kidnapped.

'I feel at home in four cities,' he says. 'London, New York, Athens and Monaco.' Monaco, though, is where he lives as a tax exile, and has his penthouse and one of his yachts; the other is in Greece. Despite the wealth and eligibility, there's no sign yet of a Mrs Stelios (he denies claims of a fling with Dannii Minogue), and the moment the questioning veers towards that sensitive subject, Stelios announces it's time for the photographs.

Like all good single billionaires, he can be found in Annabel's or St Tropez's Club 55, surrounded by pneumatic blondes, but the way he really enjoys himself is setting up new businesses. On his 37th birthday last month, he was in Miami, inspecting cruise ships. 'I try to do something constructive every day. If two or three days go by and I haven't done anything, I feel guilty. In fact, I've now turned every one of my pastimes into a business. I used to list as my only hobby " enjoying myself at sea", but ever since I started looking at cruise lines, I spend more time using my boat to go around cruise ships rather than relaxing.'

Those attempting to assess the state of Stelios's love life had therefore better wait until, like his business inspiration Richard Branson, he opens a chain of bridalwear boutiques. Only that will indicate that he's finally interested in the subject.