Stavros Niarchos, ship owner; born, Piraeus, July 3, 1909, died Switzerland, April 15, 1996

HE was the last tycoon with a fortune put at around #3000m. The great days of the Greek tanker owners have long since passed, but in the 1970s and 1980s Stavros Niarchos was one of two giants who ruled the high seas - the other was his arch-rival Aristotle Onassis.

His private life was colourful, his enmity with Onassis legendary. Like Onassis, he featured at one time as often in the gossip columns as he did in the financial pages. Onassis may have married a president's widow, the ultimate status wife, but Stavros married one of his rival's wives, Tina Livanos, who was also his sister-in-law.

Born in Piraeus, the port of Athens, he studied law at the University of Athens before entering the family grain and transport business. While working for an uncle, who was in flour milling, he decided it would be more economic to operate their own fleet - they were importing grain from Argentina - and that led in 1939 to his founding the Niarchos Group. When war broke out, he owned seven ships, six of which, used by the Allies, were sunk by the Germans. The $2m he collected in insurance payouts was used to found his new fleet.

His first marriage, when he was 21, was to a general's daughter. It lasted a year. In 1939 he married for a second time. His wife was Melpomeni Kaparis, widow of a Greek diplomat. They divorced in 1947 while he was serving as Greece's military attache in Washington. It was during his time in Washington - from 1944-48 - he had the idea of buying up surplus American Second World War Liberty ships, the basis of his peace time empire.

In 1947 he married for the third time. Eugenia Livanos was the daughter of a fellow shipping magnate, Stavros Livanos, whose sister Tina had married Onassis the previous year. The brothers-in-law embarked on a career of one-upmanship as they both built up huge tanker fleets carrying crude oil round the world. The closure of the Suez Canal in 1956 and the 1967 Six Day Arab-Israeli War gave the tankers added importance to the world economy and led to the expansion of their fleets.

When Onassis set up Olympic Airways in 1957, Niarchos retaliated by establishing a huge shipyard and oil refinery employing 2000 people outside Athens.

Eugenia and Niarchos had four children, three sons and a daughter, and were divorced in 1965.

In December of that year, against the wishes of her parents and to the amazement of the world at large, Niarchos married Charlotte Ford, daughter of the American car magnate, by whom he had a daughter. That ill-fated union ended after 15 months and he returned to Eugenia, who died in peculiar circumstances on Septspoula from an overdose of sleeping pills in May, 1970.

The post mortem indicated physical abuse, but charges against Niarchos were dropped and her injuries explained as having been the result of his attempts to revive her. In 1971 he married for the fifth and last time. His new wife was Tina Onassis, his late wife's sister and the former wife of his rival who had been replaced by Jacqueline Kennedy.

The brothers-in-law had possibly their biggest battle in 1970 during the military dictatorship which ruled Greece from 1967-74 when they both wanted to build a new oil refinary for the Colonels. In the end they signed a joint deal. Making money was more important than making war against one another.

Short, vigorous, and blessed with boundless energy, he was still skiing at the age of 80. Niarchos had lived in Switzerland for many years, and died after spending several weeks in intensive care in a clinic near Zurich.