Things aren't so easy back home

Family feuds start in small ways, and this building is certainly small. Buried behind the Athens seafront, a foot ramp descends into an oppressive basement. The rumble of printing presses is deafening, the heat intense. An elderly man stands amid the commotion. "I am investing in Eternity, in my place in Heaven," he says proudly. Around him, on every wall, images of Greek Orthodox icons keep watch.

The man's name hardly trips off the tongue: Michael Haji-Ioannou. But, from this decrepit setting in the Greek capital, he is waging a multi-million-pound war against one of Britain's most successful billionaires.

For Michael's nephew is Stelios Haji-Ioannou. His name might ring a bell: as the founder of easyJet, the budget airline that reported a massive 51.5 per cent jump in passengers last month, his family fortune is valued at nearly £1.5 billion.

Stelios, a man cut from the same cloth as Richard Branson, has just snatched his crowning glory: the £374 million takeover of British Airways' budget competitor, Go - making him the "Sun King" of cheap holiday travel.

But in Athens his uncle Michael, an austere figure just turning grey, has other ideas. Michael is claiming $1 billion from the family business - a claim based on his belief that he was pivotal in bankrolling the family's success more than four decades ago.

Today he runs a charitable foundation in Athens and prints religious tracts, a missionary of desktop publishing. At the heart of his assault on easyJet is a family feud that might truly come from a summer blockbuster: the story of three brothers from a small village in Cyprus who set out to make their fortune in shipping and oil; how twists of fate and circumstance separated those brothers and the colossal fortunes they amassed; and of one brother's children who, armed with their family inheritance, have gone on to conquer Britain's budget airline business.

Even more Byzantine, uncle Michael claims that the basis of his lawsuit lies in a verbal agreement between himself and Stelios's father; an agreement steeped in blood, a brotherly pact when both were young, vigorous entrepreneurs working night and day amid the "gold rush" of Fifties Saudi Arabia.

It is a dispute that will go to a decisive court case in Greece in September, after Michael lost the first legal bout.

Central to this compelling saga are the three Haji-Ioannou brothers, born before the Second World War: Michael; Stelios's father, Loucas; and another brother, Vassos.

From the poor Cypriot village of Pedoulas, the three young men set out to follow a relative to Saudi Arabia and make their fortune.

Money was there to be made in the early Fifties, and the three brothers had the drive and the aptitude to make it. As is often the case, they started small - an uncle having pooled family resources to buy a tanning factory in the Arabic kingdom.

It is not difficult to imagine the incredible pressures on all of them in an alien culture in the heat of a desert realm: three young men - Michael barely a teenager - armed with little more than the clothes they were wearing but, equally, with a hard-bitten ambition.

They were not going to go back to their Cypriot village as poor men. From the small roots of the tanning factory, they set up a shipping brokerage business. But disaster was to strike in wildly unforeseen circumstances: the Suez Crisis erupted - barely a memory now - but at the time, a convulsion within the Middle East that threatened to ignite the first big Cold War conflict.

Loucas, Stelios's father, fled Saudi Arabia and returned to Greece. His other two brothers, Michael and Vassos, stayed on. When the original business in Saudi collapsed, the brothers were not to be thwarted: they began importing flour and rice from the United States and Tate & Lyle sugar from Britain.

It was hard, exhausting work. Today, in Athens, Michael claims that this is where the whole complex saga really began. He says: "We were very successful in this effort and, when Loucas heard about it, he proposed that I set aside 15 per cent of the business for him."

Despite his age, Michael has a lucid and precise memory. Or so he says. He claims to have earned £6 million from the family businesses until he launched his charity in the mid-Eighties.

While he speaks, he takes himself back to the gruelling but exciting days, he in Saudi, Loucas working the fledgling shipping business back in Greece. "In July 1959 we bought our first ship," he says. "After six months we had bought five, for £320,000. We bought those ships with the money I was sending from Saudi Arabia."

The basis of Michael's claim comes down to one alleged conversation 40 years or so ago: did Michael and Stelios's father agree a deal as blood brothers? Was the business to be really split, come what may?

"It's one man's word against another," Stelios says from his Regent's Park office.

The complexities of the agreement between the brothers is baffling to an outsider. It essentially boils down to the fact that they were the owners of two businesses: one a shipping brokerage firm, the other made up of their own small fleet.

The brothers - separated geographically - split up the ownership of both businesses between them. Michael claims that he agreed to take a smaller cut of one of the firm's, while he largely ran the other. "Even though I was the principal moneymaker in the business, I didn't have a quarrel with that," he says now.

Maybe. But the crux point came in the early Seventies. Vassos - the brother on the periphery of this story - decided to withdraw from the business. That left ownership to be divided between Michael and Stelios's father Loucas, who got the bigger share.

Today, Michael appears sanguine about the arrangement made at the time. "I thought Loucas was demanding too great a share," he says. "But my influence was limited because I was still in Saudi Arabia, while he was in Greece."

The brothers had done well. But the world was changing fast. "Black gold" - oil - was the new currency. The brothers were hardly on a par with an Onassis or a Niarchos but there was big money to be made and, in their own way, they were beautifully positioned to benefit.

In 1970, their company had bought an old chemical tanker, the Dodone. The brothers planned to convert its 19,000 tonnes capacity to carry grain. But, despite extensive efforts, they could not repair the years of deterioration to make it able to properly carry edible products.

So they turned to oil instead. It was a shrewd move. "That is how we started in the oil tanker business," says Michael. "It was fate, God's plan, and we became very successful."

Within a decade, though, tragedy was to strike. In 1983, Loucas developed hydrocephalus, an appalling affliction where the liquid around the brain begins to expand, gradually causing paralysis.

It was a blow that would complicate matters. In 1989, Stelios joined his ailing father's family business and, as his father's condition worsened, the son began to assume a prominent position.

The alleged "verbal agreement" was about to get messy. Michael claims he was increasingly sidelined in the business, in the days before the family launched easyJet.

He says: "Even though I had made the business with my money they did not want me to help run it. But I had my own business interests so I was not unhappy."

As Loucas's health worsened, the battle lines were drawn. On the one side were Stelios and his own brother Polys and a sister, Clelia. It is this triumvirate of siblings which now owns the family's interest in easyJet.

On the other was an embittered Michael, who claims that, as their father became more and more ill, the children took greater control.

In Michael's view, it was he who made a verbal agreement with their father; it was this money, and his share of it, which ultimately went on to build up easyJet.

Therefore, to be brutal, he wants his cut - from his own brother, who is still terribly ill - or, cleverly, from that brother's children, who are now terribly rich.

Does he not think himself callous to be suing his own family, to be forcing them to endure this court case? He claims not to be, saying: "The money is not for me. I am a simple man and have no need of it. I want the money to give to the poor in Africa, eastern Europe and Russia. What use is money if it does not do good?"

Cynics might take a differing view. EasyJet was launched by Stelios and his siblings out of a hangar at Luton airport in 1995. It now boasts a fleet of 24 planes and a network of 40 routes across Europe. The Go takeover and easyJet's plans to buy up to 120 new planes will transform the company.

By resurrecting this family "agreement", Michael is hitting his family where it hurts. He might be a man of God; but he is a man of money as well. Inevitably, his portrait of the family history is challenged by Stelios and sister Clelia.

Clelia - who divides her time between Athens, London and Monte Carlo, and owns more than 15 per cent of easyJet - said: "He does it to upset us. Michael is a very stubborn man."

But it is on Stelios, the public face of easyJet, that much of the burden seems to have fallen. He talks easily about the dispute but there is a definite anger beneath the surface.

"What do I say?" he asks, shrugging and glancing over at the myriad office workers pumping the telephones for business. "It's an embarrassment."

Stelios stresses that easyJet, the Go deal and the entire business is safe. "Sure. If I had to give him, let's say, whatever amount of millions, then people would think I would have to sell my shares in the firm, which would lower the share price and worry investors." He leans over. "But that isn't going to happen. It's as simple as that."

Back in Athens, Michael fires another cannon shot towards his relatives: "All his life I have told Stelios that nothing lasting is achieved with money but he is very materialistic. Perhaps, when he gets older, he will learn that earthly things do not last forever."

Perhaps the last word should go to Stelios. As he stands amid his business awards and photographs of him with Bill Clinton, he shrugs and mutters: "You can't choose your relatives, can you?"